Second black box recovered from Air France crash

French air accident investigators now have both "black boxes" from the doomed Air France flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

The French air accident investigation office, the BEA, recovered the flight's cockpit voice recorder from the ocean floor overnight (NZ time), having secured the flight data recorder a day previously.

The Airbus A330-200 crashed on June 1, 2009 on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 onboard.

A French navy patrol boat will be dispatched to pick up both "black boxes" - which are actually bright orange, to enable better visibility - from aboard the vessel Ile de Sein that has been conducting the latest search for crash debris.

The storage devices will be taken to French Guyana and then flown to France where they will undergo analysis at the BEA's headquarters in Le Bourget outside Paris.

The cockpit voice recorder, in particular, could shed light on the crew's movements and verbal exchanges in the cockpit at the time of the accident. The aircraft appeared to be flying through extremely turbulent weather.

While the flight data recorder's information - if it is usable - should help explain the sequence of events that brought down the A330, the cockpit voice recorder could contain equally important data on the decision-making process the pilot and co-pilot went through.

Data sent back to Air France computers in France while the plane was in flight suggested that the speed recorders, known as pitot tubes, may have frozen and malfunctioned.

If so, the plane could have been flying at beyond its maximum allowable speed, which would cause excessive pressures on the aircraft's framework.

The cockpit voice recorder, like the other devices, were found and retrieved by the Remora 6000 unmanned underwater vehicle.

- AGENCIES