Since the US media has gone on to more current topics, I thought I would share this info from the Halifax Daily News.

Thursday, October 1, 1998

No one at controls -

Flight 111 crew died, left cockpit before crash.

By Stephen Thorne -- The Canadian Press

EASTERN PASSAGE - A Swiss pilot and his co-pilot probably abandoned the cockpit, lost consciousness, or died before their MD-11 passenger jet plummeted into the Atlantic
Ocean, says an aviation expert.

Evidence collected from the site where Swissair Flight 111 went down suggests there was no one at the controls of the wide-bodied jet shortly before it crashed Sept. 2, said Vernon Grose, a one-time presidential appointee who says he's spoken to people close to the probe.

"It may be that the crew expired before they hit," Grose said yesterday from Arlington, Va. "They may have abandoned the cockpit just due to the fire there and set it up as best they could."

Deepsea divers coming off a gruelling month salvaging the downed jet described melted electrical equipment and other evidence the plane's cockpit was an "undesirable place to be" in the minutes before it crashed.

"Some of that circuitry has gone through a lot of testing to make sure it will not do this - it will not get hot, it will not melt
down - and it was really stressed by heat," said Leading Seaman Gavin Wort, a navy diver.

Canadian authorities said they have not recovered enough material to back Grose's theory and cautioned some pieces that
appear to be burned are not.

"We've got some parts with definite heat stress on them, and they come from the cockpit area - there's no doubt about that,"
said Jim Harris, a spokesman for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

"Rather than just burn to death, they might have set it up as best they could do with an autopilot and got out of there," said Grose.

"It's a frightening thing, to say the least."