Voyage Data Recorder Could Piece Together El Faro's Final Moments

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- The National Transportation Safety Board may have moved one step closer to finding out exactly what happened to the ill-fated cargo ship El Faro.

After months spent trying to retrieve the voyage data recorder, commonly known as the ship's black box, crews were able to recover it from the wreckage of the freighter 15,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

October will mark one year since the ship left Jacksonville, Florida and sank en route to Puerto Rico amid Hurricane Joaquin, killing all 33 people on board. The ship's crew reported the ship had lost propulsion, was listing and had taken on water before losing contact with people on shore.

RELATED: Data Recorder Recovered From The Sunken Cargo Ship El Faro

The recovery of the voyage data recorder, or VDR, could potentially reveal critical details about the ship and its crew's final moments. An investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard revealed that Captain Michael Davidson had planned to take a shorter route to shave time off the ship's voyage, but ended up caught in the path of Joaquin.

One of the victims was Frank Hamm of Baltimore.

Hamm's uncle, Gordon Outlaw, told WJZ's Ava-Joye Burnett he can't imagine what the ship's crew experienced in the midst of the Category 4 Hurricane.

"If you really cared and you really took into consideration what was at stake, the fact that the storm was out there, even though it hadn't turned into the massive hurricane that it did, unfortunately it didn't have to happen," Outlaw said.

The data recorder is now in Washington, D.C. Authorities expect to start analyzing what's on it as soon as Monday.