Debris recently recovered from the site where an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 crashed in 1985 have provided investigators no additional clues as to the cause of the accident, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
The debris, which included a recording of a 1960's television drama, was recovered in 2016 by two US adventurers, as detailed in an article in Outside Magazine.
The NTSB received the materials on 4 January and examined them at the request of Bolivia's civil aviation authority, according to the board.
The materials reviewed by the NTSB "do not contain any data from Eastern Airlines flight 980's flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder and do not provide any additional information relevant to the investigation," says the board in a media release.
"The materials provided to the NTSB consisted of several metal fragments, one damaged spool of magnetic tape and two additional off-spool sections of magnetic tape," says the board.
"One metal piece was identified as a cockpit voice recorder rack. Other metal pieces were consistent with parts related to the flight data recorder pressurised container assembly," the NTSB adds.
None of the debris, however, had identifiable serial numbers.
Debris examined by the NTSB.
NTSB.
The Eastern 727 crashed on 1 January 1985 into Bolivia's Mount Illimani at an elevation of 19,600ft, killing 29 people, according to a 1999 report from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The aircraft was operating a flight from Asuncion, Paraguay to La Paz.
The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder had never been recovered "due to the extreme high altitude and inaccessibility of the accident location," the FAA's report says.
Interestingly, one of the magnetic tapes examined by the NTSB included an 18-minute Spanish-dubbed video recording of the Trial by Treehouse episode of the US television series I Spy, which aired from 1965 to 1968,according to the NTSB and online television and movie database IMDb.
The tape was not related to the aircraft's recorders, the board says.
I Spy was an adventure-espionage comedy staring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as intelligence agents posing as a tennis pro and tennis coach, according to IMDb.
Source: Cirium Dashboard
