Voice recorder found in wreckage of China Eastern plane

WUZHOU, China: Investigators have found what they believe to be the cockpit voice recorder in the wreckage of a China Eastern flight that crashed in the country's south with 132 people on board, a Chinese aviation official said on Wednesday.The outer casing of one of the two “black boxes" aboard the plane and its storage component both suffered damage, but the unit is “relatively intact," Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, told reporters at a briefing.

The recorder will be sent to Beijing for decoding and analysis, Zhu said. How long that will take depends on the degree of damage the unit suffered, he said.

“This will provide important evidence as to the cause of the accident," he said. Investigators will next “continue to go all-out to find the flight data recorder to provide even more comprehensive data support to reconstruct the entire incident," he said.

Images released earlier by state broadcaster CCTV showed workers placing a bright orange, mud-caked cylinder into a labeled, clear plastic, zip-close bag.