SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France, March 25 (Xinhua) -- The black box recovered Tuesday night from crashed Germanwing's passenger jet was damaged, said French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve on Wednesday morning.
However, "it is possible to reconstruct the elements to analyse it in the coming hours," Cazeneuve told Radio RTL.
The black box retrieved was the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), which was sent to the Investigation Office Tuesday evening, he added, without giving further information.
The black box was transported Wednesday morning to Paris to be analysed by the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), French Minister of State for Transport Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio.
The BEA "received this damaged box, but we think it is exploitable," Vidalies said.
"In two steps probably. If there are voices, rather quickly (we can retrieve the sounds). Then, if it comes to the analysis the sounds, it can take several weeks, but it will perhaps give us an explanation," he said.
The second black box which contains the flight data is still being "actively" searched, he added.
Xavier Roy, coordinator of the search operation, told Xinhua that the priority now is to find the second black box and "no corpse will be repatriated today."
He said that the search operation will last till night if weather permits.
French President Francois Hollande, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, are expected to arrive at the crash site at 1400 local time (1300 GMT) Wednesday. Some family members of victims will fly to the site later in the day.
An Airbus A320 of German budget airline Germanwings with 150 people on board crashed Tuesday in southern France en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf.
The flight was scheduled to arrive in Dusseldorf at 11:35 a.m. local time (1035 GMT), but started to descend one minute after reaching its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet at 10:45 a.m. (0945 GMT).
The aircraft was delivered to Lufthansa from the Airbus production line in 1991 and transferred to Germanwings in 2014.
