SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France, March 25 (Xinhua) -- The damaged black box recovered Tuesday night from crashed Germanwings passenger jet is being analyzed, with no cause of crash determined, said French officials.
The damaged black box, the plane's cockpit voice recorder retrieved on Tuesday, was transported Wednesday morning to Paris-based Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), French Transport Minister Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio.
If voices had been recorded, the investigation would proceed very quickly, he said.
"In two steps probably. If there are voices, rather quickly (we can retrieve the sounds). Then, if it comes to the analysis of the sounds, it can take several weeks, but it will perhaps give us an explanation," said Vidalies, adding that the second black box which contains the flight data is still being "actively" searched
Brice Robin, prosecutor of Marseille, said Wednesday that the damaged black box is under analysis and the first group of data is expected to be extracted late in the afternoon.
Noting that the causes of the crash are still undetermined, he said the extract of all data and identification of all victims would take several days and weeks respectively.
Xavier Roy, coordinator of the search operation, told Xinhua that the priority now is to find the second black box but "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.
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