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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

According to the Wikipedia, the cockpit voice recorder records only up to last two hours of the talks in the cockpit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder#Cockpit_voice_r...

It appears that even once the recorder is found we can just discover that nobody talks anything substantial in the last two hours of the long flight, that is, that "interesting" (to find the motives) conversations are already overwritten.

The flight data recorder can save more flight data but maybe it can only be the confirmation of the flight path already relatively known. Maybe the mystery won't be solved even with these devices present?

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See the accident that killed Payne Stewart[1] for an example of a not-terribly-useful cockpit voice recording.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash

Examining the hull once found will dispel a great many theories.

FDR records huge array of instruments, this data alone has solved countless crashes.

I'm afraid there's still chance that we'll learn exactly when it crashed etc but not why all this happened if it was really the result of somebody doing something intentionally and everything important happened before the last two hours. The current estimates are already that the plane simply flew on autopilot during the last hours. It's possible that nobody spoke in the cockpit at that time.

It's unlikely that no noise at all was recorded in the cockpit. Other issues have been discovered from non-voice recorded noises - like the 737 Rudder failure problem that was deduced from the noise of a pilot grunting as he tried to move the rudder.

The FDR data will still tell them whether it flew (ie pilot commanded) into the water or crashed (ie ran out of fuel or suffered engine failure), whether it had been on autopilot, whether there was an earlier fire that knocked out communication and navigation etc.

There are plenty of events where the CVR provided no useful information and the cause of the crash was determined by the FDR.

Would there be any chance of recovering data from personal phones/laptops? Assuming the passengers were alive and aware, perhaps some of them tried to document what happened.

The only problem with that idea is that electronic devices may have been scattered on the ocean floor or not survived fire or other destructive forces that happened either during flight or during landing.

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