The World - News from Jan. 15, 1989

A voice recorder has failed to explain the cause of South Africa’s worst air disaster, in which 160 people died. Investigators had hoped the recorder, recovered from a depth of 13,000 feet in the Indian Ocean off Mauritius, would help explain the November, 1987, crash of a South African Airways Boeing 747 on a flight from Taiwan to Johannesburg. “Unfortunately it does not reveal everything that we hoped for,” a Transport Ministry spokesman said. The voice quality is good, the spokesman said, but it is not clear what period had been recorded. The Johannesburg Star newspaper said the crew’s final comments were not on the tape.