Tahiti plane crash voice recorder located

PAPEETE, Aug 13 (Reuters) Search teams have located the cockpit flight recorder of a passenger aircraft that crashed last week killing at least 14 people, but authorities said they would need specialist deep-water equipment to recover it.

The conversation voice recorder on board the Twin Otter could tell investigators why the aircraft with 19 passengers and a pilot came down on Thursday shortly after taking off from the island of Moorea on a short hop to the local capital Papeete.

But local authorities in Papeete said none of their vessels was stable enough to provide a platform for the underwater robot being sent from Paris to recover the recorder, discovered at a depth of around 430 metres.

France may ask neighbouring countries to lend it a vessel to conduct the recovery operation, the authorities said in a statement late yesterday.

Fourteen bodies have been recovered but six people remain missing and authorities hold out no hope of any survivors.

Senior official Anne Bocquet said teams would continue to search for wreckage and bodies for a further two weeks and had asked local fishermen to report objects found at sea.

Two police air crash investigators have been sent to the zone to work with three civilian experts in situ since Saturday.

Moorea is one of around 118 islands scattered across an area the size of Europe in the South Pacific that make up France's overseas territory of French Polynesia.

REUTERS RJ HS1412