On July 21, Brazil's firemen found the black box containing the pilots' voice recording in the wreckage of the TAM airlines plane that crashed in Sao Paulo earlier, Brazil's Air Force said.

Brazilian authorities had already sent what they thought were the flight's two black boxes to Washington for analysis. But a statement from the Air Force said one of them turned out to be a simple tape recorder and not the flight voice recorder.

The error was due to major damage sustained by the equipment as a result of the crash and subsequent fire, it said.

The July 17 crash was the deadliest in Brazil's aviation history, when a TAM airlines Airbus A320 crashed into a fuel station and exploded on landing at the airport, killing nearly 200 people, including 187 aboard and at least four others on the ground.