He is losing his memory, and the tape recorder contains instructions on how to go about completing his opera, based on "Moby-Dick".
The Watergate operation in 1972 that President Nixon later tried to cover up involved nine open-reel tape recorders containing over 3,000 hours of conversation obtained from wire taps in the White House that exposed presidential power and its abuse.
That is because the vast majority of commercial recordings contain coded signals that prevent video recorders from making a clean copy.
The plane's two recorders – one containing flight data, the other carrying voice recordings from the flight deck – were handed over to French experts after they were recovered damaged from the wreckage in the Mediterranean and Egyptian investigators could not download their contents.
The chance of the recorders not containing good data is very slim, he says.
Investigators also plan to study maintenance records and the locomotive's event recorder, which contains information about its speed, braking and other data.
This will show whether this recorder also contains relevant information, in which case the data from both recorders will be combined.
The Brazilian and French recovery teams are continuing to search around the clock for the recorder, which contains data on the plane's altitude, airspeed and heading and voice recordings from the cockpit.
The second is the flight data recorder, which contains technical information on the engines, wings and cabin pressure.
The recorder, which contains data from hundreds of sensors that measure heat, vibration and strain, was recovered two weeks ago near Hemphill, Tex.
