VALUJET'S CREW KEPT CALM TO END : CONTROLLERS RECORDED FINAL CONVERSATION.

Byline: Martin Merzer The Miami Herald

The co-pilot: ``We need to return to Miami.''

The flight controller: ``What is the nature of your problem?''

The co-pilot: ``We have smoke in the cockpit, smoke in the cabin.''

A tape of the final, harrowing conversations between the crew of doomed ValuJet Flight 592 and air traffic controllers reveals rising anxiety but cool professionalism, desperate measures to guide the plane back to Miami and a flight controller persistently barking commands to a jetliner that could no longer be controlled.

``There wasn't anything anyone could do to get that plane back on the ground,'' a source who has heard the tape told The Miami Herald. The source provided The Herald with an account of what was captured by a recorder in the control tower.

Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board, now analyzing the tape in Washington, are harvesting important details of the final minutes before tragedy befell 110 victims of South Florida's worst air disaster.

The DC-9 nose-dived into the Everglades on May 11, killing everyone aboard.

The source said the crew never explicitly declared an emergency, but controllers at Miami International Airport immediately perceived the grave circumstances and treated the incident as an in-flight crisis.

From the cockpit, only the voice of co-pilot Richard Hazen, 52, of Mineola, Texas, is heard on the tape. At a memorial service Thursday in Texas, Hazen's brother Don said: ``He was a very positive person. He lived life one day at a time.''

Pilot Candalyn ``Candi'' Kubeck, 35, of Phoenix, apparently devoted all of her final moments to wrestling with the controls or seeking the source of the smoke on Flight 592. Investigators now believe that a fire erupted in a cargo compartment near the cockpit.

A DC-9 carries a two-person flight crew. Aviation experts said it would be entirely proper under the circumstances for the pilot to concentrate on flying the plane while the co-pilot handled communications.

Hazen's voice grew increasingly agitated but never seemed out of control. ``The transmissions became shorter and more tense,'' said the source.

Near the end, Hazen's voice sounded muffled. ``We don't know if it was the anxiety or if he put on his oxygen mask,'' the source explained.

The last discernible words from the cockpit came from Hazen, who repeated a direction from the controller: ``Turning left at 140 (degrees), descending to 5,000.''

That was followed by garbled sounds that investigators could not immediately identify.

The flight controller persisted in transmitting commands to the plane, even after Hazen ceased responding. Twice, the controller directed turns and altitude adjustments.

``And then the controller lost radar contact,'' said the source. ``It was over.''

Federal aviation authorities do not expect to release an official transcript of the tape for several weeks.

``We want to make sure everything is precise as it can be as we piece together this puzzle,'' NTSB spokesman Mike Benson said earlier this week. ``We're in the process of reviewing and verifying it.''

Transmissions between a flight crew and flight controllers are among the most significant clues in the reconstruction of any aviation accident. They could be particularly critical in this case because so little of the wreckage - about 25 percent - has been recovered. Other vital clues come from the flight data recorder carried by every commercial aircraft. The device aboard ValuJet's DC-9 was recovered soon after the crash and also is being analyzed in Washington.