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ANALYSIS
When the aircraft disappeared there was scant evidence of what had occurred and of where it was. Step by step, by painstaking and at times very costly efforts, important evidence has been recovered. That evidence has come from, inter alia, the findings at the post mortem examinations performed on the few bodies which, by an extraordinary chance, were recovered from the sea; the location by sonar side-scan devices, after prolonged, expensive and fruitless searching, for the wreckage ln the Indian Ocean 134 nautical miles North-east of Plaisance Tower, lying at depths of the order of 15 000 feet (about 4,5 kilometers); the identification, in Operation Resolve, of two distinct fields of wreckage; the expert analyses and interpretation of the ATC tape, portions of which were unintelligible; the remarkable technological achievement of locating and recovering the CVR from the ocean floor and the expert analyses and interpretation of garbled but significant items of speech and noise recorded thereon; the location and recovery of important elements of wreckage from the ocean floor; the production and analysis of some 3 900 photographs and over 800 hours of video studies of selected items of wreckage at these great depths; the identification and sources of the cargo packed ln the respective pallets on board the Helderberg at the time of the accident; a mass of expert findings on numerous
