Andrew Vaughan / The Canadian Press The co-pilot's chair is seen in the partially rebuilt cockpit of Swissair Flight 111. SWISSAIR FACTS The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has issued several recommendations and safety advisories since Swissair Flight 111 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on Sept. 2, 1998. Their American counterpart, the National Transportation Safety Board, has also recommended new safety regulations: January 1999: Based on the Canadian board's investigation, the American agency asks the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the U.S. to inspect cockpit wiring on all MD-11s. March 1999: The Canadian board recommends flight recorders have independent power sources and be able to record up to two hours rather than 30 minutes. August 1999: The FAA orders metallized Mylar blanket insulation be replaced after it is found to be flammable. The Canadian board had issued an advisory that Mylar use be reduced or eliminated. September 1999: The FAA bans the in-flight entertainment system used on Flight 111. April 2000: Acting on a directive from Canadian investigators, the FAA orders map-reading lights on MD-11s inspected or shut off. In inspections, flammable blanket insulation was found pressed against many of the lights and showed signs of heat damage. April 2000: The FAA issues eight safety orders concerning MD-11 electrical systems, bringing to over 30 the number of airworthiness directives since the crash. December 2000: The Canadian board issues five safety recommendations aimed at detecting and suppressing in-flight fires.

By Alison Auld / The Canadian Press

The shattered remains of Swissair Flight 111 hang in a demented puzzle from a steel-mesh frame shaped like the nose of a sleek MD-11 jet.

In the front is the mangled seat where the co-pilot struggled to keep the plane in the air in its dying moments on Sept. 2, 1998.

Behind is the doorway that led to passengers who must have huddled in terror. Bits of twisted metal hang from the frame like a surrealist's impression of what an airplane should look like.

There are gaping holes where pieces were never found or were pulverized so completely by the force of the crash they are now unrecognizable.

A small rock the size of child's fist is embedded in one piece of grossly distorted metal, wedged in when the plane smashed into the ocean floor off Peggy's Cove, N.S., killing all 229 aboard.

Scorched metal and plastic hang eerily where gleaming silver controls once rested.

Walking into a cold hangar where investigators undertook the gruelling and emotional job of piecing together the wreckage of the doomed jet is an overwhelming, visceral experience.

It leaves no doubt as to the massive impact the jetliner suffered as it plowed into waters of St. Margaret's Bay, snapping bolts of steel and crumpling aluminum sheets into balls.

And it shows just how impossible it must have seemed to investigators who were confronted with the task of rebuilding the MD-11.

"When I look at it, it amazes me when you consider what we started with," Doug McEwen, an investigator with the Transportation Safety Board, said from Hangar A at Shearwater airport, where the reconstruction of the plane's cockpit was carried out.

"The pieces were extremely small and incredibly difficult to identify, so it's quite unique."

A team of senior investigators and aviation industry experts began with two million pieces of wreckage, most of it smashed to bits and strewn 60 metres under the water's surface.

But they didn't have the last crucial minutes from the voice and data recorders, their contents destroyed in a massive power failure on board.

With such meagre evidence and limited options, the team decided to rebuild the cockpit, the section of the plane where it appeared the trouble began.

For weeks, they plucked what they could from the water's surface - human remains, personal effects and parts of the mangled plane.

Divers were then dispatched to the ocean floor to recover debris and remains, and a high-powered suction device pulled up the heavier pieces.

All of it was then shipped to the hangar, where the effort to put the plane back together began. Their focus quickly narrowed to an area at the front of the plane extending about two metres forward and five metres back from the cockpit bulkhead, where it was suspected a fire flared above the pilot's and co-pilot's seats.

"It became obvious we didn't have to reconstruct the whole airplane, that the significant portion of the airplane was above floor level and in the front," says Don Enns, a Transportation Safety Board investigator who specialized in the fire section of the unit.

"But it was tremendously difficult. It's a gigantic jigsaw puzzle and it's missing an unknown number of pieces."

Engineers, including the plane's designer, arrived with blueprints to lay out a design for the reconstruction, which was built by the provincial Department of Highways.

Investigators had to scour each piece to remove corrosive sea water. The team - a core of about a dozen people - sifted through the material, cataloguing each piece and storing the parts that didn't come from the cockpit in more than 700 boxes.

Then came the job of taking a strand of twisted metal, sometimes with no identifying number, and figuring out where it belonged on the jetliner.

"You find a six-inch piece of frame and you look at it and say, 'There are a hundred or a thousand different places in the airplane where this could go, but because there's burn damage you know it's from the front of the plane," says Enns, who wraps up this phase of the investigation next Friday when it moves to Ottawa. There investigators will use a 3-D computer model to study the cockpit.

The joy of finding a piece sometimes rang out in the lofty hangar.

"You could be walking across the hangar and all of a sudden somebody would let out a little shriek, 'Look I found one - I found a match!'."

Each of the 1,500 pieces strung along the metal frame bears its weight and identification number, helping to fill a database with 14,272 items.

Many of the pieces, like the shredded harness on the co-pilot's seat and an engine's jagged fan blade, have shed a measure of light on this investigation, said to be one of the most complicated in aviation history.

The Transportation Safety Board, which has spent $50 million on the probe and expects to issue a final report next year, admits it might never know conclusively what happened that night.

But the agency says it has gleaned valuable lessons it has included in a handful of recommendations it says will greatly improve airline safety.

The reconstruction has also provided comfort to some grieving family members who saw how far the agency went in trying to solve the baffling case.

Vibeke Arnmark, whose husband Per Spanne died in the crash, took her twin daughters to the hangar on the one-year anniversary of the disaster.

"There was a lot of mixed feelings because you get very clearly, right up in your face, that all the pieces were so scattered and so small and then you think about your loved one and that is a very, very difficult thing to even imagine," she said from her home in Long Island, N.Y.

"It's amazing that they could do that. If that costs millions of dollars, it's worth it, every million to avoid anything like this. There shouldn't be any doubt about that."

But there have been skeptics.

Vernon Grose, former member of the National Safety Transportation Board in the U.S., questions what the Canadian agency has accomplished. The recent recommendations only rehash what the agency knew soon after the crash, he says. "The upshot of it is, is it worth it to spend millions to go back and get all the pieces and try to put them together?" he said.

"It's taken them two-and-a-half years to reach this rather innocuous conclusion which we already knew a few days after the accident."

Enns and McEwen, 44, who spent three birthdays in Halifax and almost two years away from his family in Vancouver, say they might not know the cause of the crash, but their recommendations will revolutionize the way airlines deal with fires.

"It'll be argued about for quite some time, but we will hauling the entire industry into the 21st century," says Enns, 47.