Air France Flight 447’s cockpit voice recorder found

French investigators today recovered the cockpit voice recorder from an Air France plane that crashed nearly two years ago, killing all 228 people on board. The discovery has come ''only hours'' after the recovery of the flight data recorder, according to Air France chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon.

The CEO was citing the official French air accident investigation agency, the Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses (BEA).

The voice data recorder registers cockpit conversations. The machine was located Monday and raised from the ocean floor on Tuesday, according to the BEA.

With the plane's flight data recorder being recovered on Sunday, both pieces central to determining the cause of the 1 June 2009 crash have now been found. Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down in the Atlantic northeast of Brazil in extremely stormy weather.

BEA officials have warned that both these pieces of equipment may yet prove useless, considering the pressure they were subjected to for nearly two years at such ocean depths. A BEA spokesperson said it wouldn't be possible to say in advance that the data would be usable until the modules were opened.

Air France flight 447 crashed in stormy weather without any clear indications for the reasons of the crash. It has taken nearly two years and a massive undersea search with deep-dive equipment, including robotic submarines, to locate the bulk of the wreckage on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.