The search for the Air France black box.

[u-5075]

Two Articles:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/ ... id=1656151

Search for jet's black box could take months
Depth of water, huge search area, weather all problems

Natalie Alcoba, National Post Published]http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... in_america[/url]

Brazil Navy to Reach Crash Debris as Undersea Search Is Planned


By Francisco Marcelino and Helene Fouquet

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- A Brazilian ship today is due to reach floating debris from the Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, as recovery crews prepared to search for the wreckage at a depth of almost 2 miles.

The debris spotted by searchers yesterday off northeastern Brazil confirms that the Airbus SAS A330-200 crashed, Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said in Rio de Janeiro. The material, found over a 5-kilometer (3.1-mile) stretch of ocean, consists of wire and metal pieces, he said. The debris was found about 650 kilometers northeast of Brazil’s Fernando de Noronha island.

A Brazilian patrol vessel will reach the site today at about 11 a.m. New York time, according to a Navy statement. Plane parts are marked with identification numbers that would allow the components to be tracked. Flight 447 went down with 228 people aboard as it flew to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.

“There is no doubt the debris is from the Air France plane, but we still need to do a formal analysis to confirm it,” French Defense Ministry spokesman Christophe Prazuck said today in a telephone interview. “This will happen in the next few days. We need to find a piece of debris that bears a distinctive sign, like a serial number.” He declined to comment further on the investigation.

The wreckage may be located at a depth of 2,000 to 3,000 meters (6,600 to 9,800 feet), French Energy Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said today. France is sending a mini-submarine to the site aboard an oceanographic vessel, Prazuck said. The mini-sub can dive 6,000 meters and will be used to recover the plane’s flight-data and voice recorders after the wreckage is found. The ship will take about eight days to reach the area.

Sensors Froze

Some of the plane’s exterior sensors had frozen, Borloo said on France’s RMC radio, confirming a report on the Web site of the weekly magazine Le Point. The magazine also said the last transmission from the plane concerned electrical failures.

Air France said it isn’t ruling out a lightning strike on the aircraft, which reported an electrical-circuit breakdown and sent 10 automated distress messages before it vanished. The debris was found away from the flight path, suggesting the plane may have attempted to turn back, Brazilian Air Force Colonel Jorge Amaral said yesterday.

The French Aviation Accidents Investigation Bureau expects to publish a preliminary report on the crash by the end of this month, Paul Louis Arslanian, head of the agency, said at a news conference in Paris today.

It may be “weeks or months” before any cause is determined, French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said in an interview on French radio station Europe One yesterday.

Towering Thunderstorms

The plane probably flew into thunderstorms that stretched for 600 kilometers, towered as high as 15,000 meters and may have produced lightning, State College, Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather.com said yesterday in a statement. Updrafts as strong as 160 kilometers per hour may have resulted from the storms, creating “severe” turbulence, it said.

“Did we enter a period of climate shocks of an extraordinary violence? This is a question we will have to ask ourselves,” Borloo said. “Experts are divided on that question.”

Terrorism was unlikely and isn’t thought by investigators to have been the cause, although it can’t be ruled out, he said.

“There is no sign of an attack. It was a sudden problem but it wasn’t instantaneous,” Borloo said. All checks on the aircraft were done correctly before the takeoff, he added.

Brazilian Vice President Jose Alencar ordered three days of mourning as a mark of respect for the victims.

Brazil and France dispatched spotter planes, helicopters and navy vessels to locate the plane, which lost contact two days ago after hitting turbulence. The U.S. military is also assisting in the search.

Paris Prosecutor

The Paris prosecutor’s office took over the crash investigation from the prosecutor in Bobigny, near Charles de Gaulle airport, the plane’s destination. The prosecutor’s office has asked special aviation investigators to look into the events that caused the crash, it said in an e-mailed statement today.

The involvement of prosecutors in French air-crash investigations “is not required under law, but is customary,” Simon Foreman, a partner with Soulez Lariviere & Associes, said today in a telephone interview. The Paris law firm has been involved in several cases involving large-scale loss of life, including the Air France Concorde crash.

“Every time there is a catastrophe, prosecutors investigate the causes of death,” Foreman said.

“It is a practice that is much criticized by the aviation security community, because it inserts the police into every investigation,” he said. “People get intimidated once the police are involved.”

Passenger List

Air France said it may release the passenger list today. Those on board included 58 Brazilians, 61 French and 26 Germans as well as more than a dozen other nationalities. Brazil’s Jobim said the list may not be complete because some families requested the names of relatives not be made public.

Until now, the A330, a twin-engine airliner that carries about 250 people, had never had a fatal accident in commercial flight. A development model crashed after takeoff during testing, according to Paul Hayes, director of safety at Ascend, an aviation consultant in the U.K.

One high-profile incident with an A330 that didn’t include fatalities occurred on Oct. 7, 2008, when passengers and crew on a Qantas Airways Ltd. flight from Singapore to Perth were slammed into the cabin ceiling after the plane abruptly lost altitude. Fourteen people had serious injuries.

Computer Component

Australian air safety investigators said a month later that a fault in a flight system computer component may have caused the nosedive. The investigation is still under way.

Airbus yesterday said there’s no way of knowing yet whether there are similarities in the two cases.

“It’s premature to link the incidents as long as the investigators don’t have the flight recorder to give more visibility on what happened,” said Stefan Schaffrath, a company spokesman, in a phone interview from Airbus’s Toulouse, France, headquarters.

There are more than 600 A330s flying worldwide that have logged a total of 30 million flight hours, he said.

The missing Airbus was delivered to Air France in April 2005 and had flown about 18,000 hours on some 2,500 flights, the manufacturer said in a statement. The company said it is offering technical assistance in the investigation. Airbus declined to comment on the cause of the crash.

To contact the reporters on this story]Hfouquet1@bloomberg.net[/url].

Last Updated: June 3, 2009 06:04 EDT

[u-5075]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... AD98K0HAG2

Sub that explored

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... AD98K0HAG2

Sub that explored Titanic to aid Flight 447 search
By EMMA VANDORE – 5 hours ago

PARIS (AP) — A mini-submarine that explored the undersea wreckage of the Titanic is being whisked across the Atlantic to help retrieve the flight recorders of Air France Flight 447.

The French marine research institute Ifremer said Thursday it has pulled the ship Pourquoi Pas? (Why Not?) off a research mission in the Azores to help find the remains of the Airbus plane. Flight 447 disappeared Sunday night en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris after flying into a dangerous band of thunderstorms over the Atlantic Ocean.

On board the research ship is the Nautile, an 8-meter (26-foot) long deep ocean submarine that has made multiple dives to the Titanic and a remote-controlled robot called Victor 6000.

"The priority for us is to find the black boxes," said Vincent Rigaud, head of Ifremer's underwater system department. "We will do everything we can to find them."

Search teams have a month to locate the plane's two black boxes — the cockpit voice and flight data recorders — before they stop emitting signals. They could be scattered nearly anywhere across a vast undersea mountain range below the surface of the ocean.

The French ship will dock in the Cape Verde Islands off Africa's western coast on June 8 to pick up equipment — including a hydrophonic microphone — and personnel.

Manned by 25 sailors and a team of 20 specialists, the ship should reach the site off the northeast coast of Brazil where military aircraft are searching for remains of the plane by June 11 or 12, Rigaud said.

The supersensitive microphone will then be deployed to depths of 500 meters (1,640 feet) above the seabed to locate the continuous "pinging" signals emitted by the black boxes, which are believed to up to 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) below the sea.

"It's not going to be easy," Rigaud said. "The zone is very large. It's the first time we are trying to find black boxes so deep."

If the microphone detects the pinging, the mini-sub Nautile and the robot Victor will be deployed.

The Nautile can carry a three-man crew jammed into a nearly 10-foot (2.1-meter) diameter cabin. Three tiny portholes allow the crew to peer outside for the black boxes, which are actually bright orange and covered in reflective tape.

The vessel is also equipped with a panoramic sonar, capable of detecting signals up to 200 meters (218 yards) to the side, and several cameras. The black boxes could be retrieved by two mechanical arms.

The Nautile made several dives to the Titanic in 1987, 1993, 1994, 1996 and 1998, including when the wreck was first discovered. It has also been used to recover wreckage from several planes that went down in the ocean.

The Victor is attached by electrical and optical cables to the Pourquoi Pas? and is operated by staff on the boat.

Still, the head of France's accident investigation agency, Paul-Louis Arslanian, has said he was "not optimistic" that officials would ever recover the black boxes from the plane. Experts have also told The Associated Press that layers of warm and cold water, with differing salinity, can affect the signals emitting from the black boxes, making them harder to find.

In 1998, search teams struggled to find black boxes from an Indonesian Boeing 737 that plunged into the sea on New Year's Day, killing all 102 people on board. The Adam Air plane was flying from the island of Java to an airport in eastern Indonesia when it spiraled from the sky from an altitude of 33,000 feet (10,000 meters).

The pings emitted by the recorders were located three weeks later by the U.S. Navy's oceanographic survey ship Mary Sears at a depth of over 6,500 feet (2,000 meters). But it took another eight months before the U.S. marine salvage firm Phoenix International recovered the boxes.

Although the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 could end up at a greater water depth, the Adam Air salvage showed that black boxes deep underwater can be successfully recovered if their position is precisely fixed before their beacons stop functioning.

Associated Press writer Slobodan Lekic contributed to this article from Brussels.

[u-5075]

Below are the more interesting

Below are the more interesting reports about this search.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8085539.stm#story

Includes a good map of plane's route and one photo of a French nuc sub.

Nuclear sub to join hunt for jet
A French nuclear submarine is being sent to help find an Air France jet which disappeared over the Atlantic.

French defence minister Herve Morin said the hunter-killer submarine had surveillance equipment that could help find the plane's flight data recorders.

As the search continued, it was revealed that debris salvaged from the sea was not from the jet.

Airbus has reissued guidelines to pilots after experts said the plane may have had false speed measurements.

A spokesman for Airbus said that a notice had been sent reminding Airbus air crews worldwide what to do when speed indicators give conflicting read-outs.


See a map of the plane's route

Spokesman Justin Dubon said that the inconsistent readings meant that "the air speed of the aircraft was unclear".

He said that in such circumstances, flight crews should maintain thrust and pitch and - if necessary - level off the plane and start troubleshooting procedures as detailed in operating manuals.



The BBC's Tom Symonds says erratic speed readings could have been caused by heavy turbulence and might have caused the plane's automatic throttle to power up or down as it passed through heavy storms.

Meteorologists say that the Air France Flight 447 had entered an unusual storm with 100mph (160km/h) updrafts that sucked water up from the ocean.

As the moisture reached the plane's high altitude it quickly froze in -40C temperatures. The updrafts would also have created dangerous turbulence, they say.

The Airbus A330 jet vanished over the Atlantic en-route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Monday with 228 people on board.

A small group of relatives of those on board the plane has gone to the north-eastern Brazilian city of Recife where the rescue operation is based. They are to be given a chance to tour the facility and to ask questions.

As the search continued on Friday, it was revealed that a wooden pallet and a fuel slick in the vicinity of the plane's last known position were not from the jet.

Brazilian air force official Brig Ramon Borges Cardoso contradicted earlier reports, saying "no material from the plane has been recovered".

The slick was most likely from a passing ship, he said.

Navy ships are reported to be scouring the ocean, about 1,100km (690 miles) north-east of Brazil's coast, in an effort to locate other debris spotted from the air on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Research ship

A French marine research ship equipped with two non-nuclear mini-submarines is already on its way to the area.

Three more Brazilian boats and a French ship equipped with small submarines are expected to arrive in the area in the next few days.

French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said the priority was looking for wreckage from the plane before it sinks or disappears.

French officials have said the flight data recorders, which could be deep under water, may never be found.

In another development on Friday, the Paris prosecutor's office opened a manslaughter inquiry into the air crash.

It is a routine step taken by authorities in connection with the deaths of French citizens overseas.

"Following the disappearance of the Air France Airbus A330 between Rio de Janeiro and Paris, the Paris prosecutor's office has opened a judicial inquiry against unnamed persons on charges of manslaughter," a statement said.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/ju ... s-atlantic

This article includes a time line of the automated messages. A selected abstract of this is below. Also some of the reports of debris turned out not to be from this plane.


Debris found in Atlantic not from missing Air France plane

"With the crucial flight recorders still missing, investigators were relying heavily on the plane's automated messages to help reconstruct what happened as the jet flew through violent thunderstorms on Sunday.

The last message from the pilot was a manual signal at 11pm local time, saying he was flying through an area of black, electrically charged clouds with violent winds and lightning.

At 11:10pm, a series of problems began: the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems. Then systems for monitoring air speed, altitude and direction failed, as did controls over the main flight computer and wing spoilers.

At 11:14 pm, a final automatic message signalled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure as the plane broke apart.

France's accident investigation agency established that the series of automatic messages gave conflicting signals about the plane's speed, and that the flight path went through dangerously stormy weather.

The agency warned against "hasty interpretation or speculation" after the French newspaper Le Monde reported, without naming sources, that the plane was flying too slowly before the disaster."

[u-5075]

Video, good coverage, Associated Press

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWSPQesVnbw

Debris

Video, good coverage, Associated Press

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWSPQesVnbw

Debris Doesn't Match; Flight 447 Mystery Deepens

[raalst]

you would expect that SOSUS

you would expect that SOSUS could indicate the crash site up to a few miles

[u-5075]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/world ... ne.html?hp

Air France Was

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/world ... ne.html?hp

Air France Was Warned of Speed Sensor Problem Before Crash

By NICOLA CLARK and LIZ ROBBINS
Published]http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... Cz81jNNuUU[/url]

Air France Airbus That Crashed Was Awaiting Sensor Replacement


June 6 (Bloomberg) -- The Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic this week was awaiting replacement of a speed sensor that investigators identified as a likely contributor to the accident.

The sensor, made by Thales SA, gave inconsistent readings on the speed of the Airbus A330 jet en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro June 1. Airbus SAS had advised airlines more than a year ago to replace the sensors on A330 jets with models that are less vulnerable to ice, two people with knowledge of the matter said yesterday.

France’s chief crash investigator today told journalists at a briefing near Paris that the failure of the air sensor to convey reliable speed data may have kicked off the chain of events that led to the deaths of all 228 people aboard.

[u-5075]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/ ... ane.crash/

Bodies of Air

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/ ... ane.crash/

Bodies of Air France passengers found

PARIS, France (CNN) -- Bodies have been found from the crash of an Air France plane that disappeared Monday, the Brazilian air force said Saturday.


Also, one seat and a suitcase were recovered at sea by a vessel participating in the search, the air force said in Recife, Brazil.

Earlier in the day, aviation investigators said Flight 447 sent out 24 automated error messages, including one saying the aircraft's autopilot had disengaged, before it vanished with 228 people on board.

They also reported that the airline had failed to replace a part, as recommended by the manufacturer, Airbus.

Airbus had advised airlines to update equipment that monitors speed, known as Pitot tubes. The recommendation was a result of technological developments and improvements, an Airbus spokesman told CNN's Richard Quest. The change was not mandatory, and the spokesman would not comment on Air France's failure to follow the advice.

Planes have crashed because of faulty or blocked Pitot tubes in the past, Quest said, and there was clearly something wrong with the doomed plane's speed-monitoring equipment.

But it may be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the Pitot tubes, he added, as the jet apparently was experiencing massive system failures.

Even as they analyzed the error messages and satellite images of the doomed flight's path, investigators said they still have a lot of work to determine what caused the plane to go down.

"I would just like to ask you to bear in mind that all of this is dynamic and there are a lot of question marks," said Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of France's accident investigation bureau.

"We don't know how the aircraft entered the water. We don't know how these pieces of debris entered into the water and that you have to take into account the current ... and the shape of the ocean floor."

The error messages suggest that the plane may have been flying too fast or too slow through the stormy weather it encountered before the crash, officials said.

In addition, investigators have said the plane's autopilot disengaged, cabin pressure was lost, and there was an electrical failure before the disaster.

The jet's manufacturer, Airbus, sent a Telex to operators of Airbus models reminding them of what to do when speed indicators give conflicting readings.

The spokesman said the notice does not mean there is any major flaw in the aircraft but is simply a reminder to pilots of what to do in the cockpit if they get conflicting information about air speed. Watch as experts question whether recovery is possible »

All 228 passengers and crew aboard the Airbus 330 are presumed to have died when the plane disappeared northeast of the Fernando de Noronha Islands, 355 kilometers (220 miles) off the northeast coast of Brazil.

The flight originated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was en route to Paris, France. Map of Flight 447's flight path »

Search teams were still trying to find debris from the jet Saturday, two days after a Brazilian Air Force official said debris plucked from the ocean was not from the Air France jet.

[tom dougherty]

you would expect that SOSUS

you would expect that SOSUS could indicate the crash site up to a few miles

There were no SOSUS hydrophone array installations in the South Atlantic. SOSUS arrays were primarily in the Greenland, Iceland, UK region in the Atlantic, and another network (Adak, Pearl, Guam, etc.) in the Pacific. Further if the region where the plane went down is mountaineous, as reported, that further compicates the picture in terms of acoustic propagation.

Locating the Scorpion with hydrophone recordings was difficult due to the distances from hydrophones, and Scorpion was in the North Atlantic west of the Azores.

[u-5075]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... gDhy328UpQ

Brazil finds key

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... gDhy328UpQ

Brazil finds key piece from downed Air France jet
By Marcelo Lluberas – 2 days ago

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil (AFP) — Brazil's navy on Monday recovered the tail fin from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic a week ago, and was transporting 16 bodies to shore for identification.

The recovery of the fin was seen as important to the search for answers as to what knocked the Airbus A330, flight AF 447, out of the sky on June 1 as it was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board.

The plane's black boxes were mounted in the tail section, and the fin's location could narrow the underwater search for those devices by a French submarine expected to arrive in the zone on Wednesday.

Brazilian officials meanwhile were preparing to receive the 16 bodies plucked from amid the floating debris over the weekend.

Those remains, and dozens of the plane's structural components which have also been picked up, were expected to arrive in the Brazilian archipelago Fernando de Noronha early on Tuesday.

From there the bodies would be flown to the mainland coastal city of Recife, a navy spokesman in Recife, Captain Guicemar Tabosa told reporters.

Brazilian police forensic teams have been set up to identify the bodies using dental records and DNA from relatives.

Tabosa said navy crews had not yet confirmed information given by families on the doomed flight that it appeared two more bodies had been spotted on Monday.

Brazilian and French officials said there was no hope of finding survivors from the downed plane.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in his weekly radio address on Monday that "everything was being done... so that we can find, if possible, all the bodies, because we know how much it means for a family to receive their lost loved one."

Brazilian and French teams continued to scour the crash zone 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) off Brazil's northeast coast for more bodies and pieces of wreckage.

The clock is ticking for finding the black boxes, believed to lie on the sea floor at a depth of up to 6,000 meters (19,700 feet). Their homing beacons will cease to operate in three weeks.

The US Navy said on Sunday it would send two towable pinger locators and a crew of around 20 to the scene later this week to join the hunt for the devices.

"The first ship should head to the scene on (June) 10th," Pentagon spokesman and US navy commander Jeffrey Gordon told AFP. "They can be used for locating submarines or anything under the water that can emit a sound."

If the voice and data recorders are found, a French research sub -- the same one that has explored the wreck of the Titanic -- will be deployed to recover them. That small sub, the Nautile, is also expected to arrive within days.

The disaster is the worst aviation accident since 2001, and unprecedented in Air France's 75-year history.

No distress call was received from the flight crew of the doomed plane.

Early suspicions are focusing on the Airbus A330's airspeed sensors, which appeared to have malfunctioned in the minutes before the catastrophe according to some of the 24 automatic data warnings sent by the plane.

Investigators are looking at whether the sensors, known as pitots, could have iced over, possibly leading the Air France pilots to fly into a storm in the zone that day without knowing their airspeed.

Such a scenario could have resulted in "two bad consequences for the survival of the plane," France's transport minister Dominique Bussereau told French radio on the weekend.

They were, he said: "Too low a speed, which can cause it to stall, or too high a speed, which can lead to the plane ripping up as it approached the speed of sound, as the outer skin is not designed to resist such speed."

[u-5075]

A RETIRED AMERICAN AIRLINES PILOT

A RETIRED AMERICAN AIRLINES PILOT GIVES HIS OPINIONS AND GUESSTIMATIONS.

http://www.petergreenberg.com/2009/06/0 ... flight-447

Experts Discuss Theories On Crash of Air France Flight 447

This past weekend, Peter sat down with a variety of experts to discuss the crash of Air France Flight 447.

He checked in with retired American Airlines pilot Tom Casey about flying in turbulent weather as well as Greg Feith, former lead NTSB investigator, about the ongoing investigation and recovery efforts, plus pilot Patrick Smith and Wall Street Journal columnist Scott McCartney.

To listen to these interviews and more, click here to visit our radio archives.

First up was retired American Airlines pilot Tom Casey…

Peter Greenberg]http://momento24.com/en/2009/06/14/air- ... earch-off/[/url]

Air France]http://www.eurocockpit.com[/url].

[u-5075]

Two articles focusing on finding

Two articles focusing on finding the black boxes. Doesn't look too encouraging.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... 604008.htm

Air France search scaled back
By Richard Reynolds

Posted 10 hours 7 minutes ago

Brazilian and French authorities are scaling back the search for bodies from Air France flight 447 which crashed in the mid-Atlantic ocean three weeks ago.

The Brazilian Air Force has withdrawn a sophisticated radar search plane from the operation, saying there is little more to be gained.

Fifty bodies have been recovered along with some debris from the plane itself, but there is little hope of recovering anything further.

There are still some smaller Brazilian and French Navy vessels scouring the area, but little has been recovered in the past week.

Meanwhile, a French nuclear submarine is still searching for the two black boxes from the flight.

The batteries which power the underwater beacons which would allow the sub to locate the boxes are expected to expire within the week.

The Air France Airbus A330 carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris came down in the Atlantic on June 1.

http://www.mercurynews.com/nationworld/ci_12653139

Massive ocean search for Air France black boxes


By Alexei Barrionuevo and Matthew L. Wald, New York Times

Posted: 06/19/2009 09:47:33 PM PDT
Updated: 06/19/2009 09:54:10 PM PDT

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Three ships and a nuclear submarine are engaged in the most extensive marine search for black boxes from an airline accident in modern aviation history, air safety experts said Friday.

Search teams, with crew and equipment from the French and U.S. navies, continued to sound the deep Atlantic waters on Friday, straining to hear an acoustic ping emitted from the flight data and cockpit recorders of Air France Flight 447, which crashed some 620 miles off the coast of northern Brazil in the early morning hours of June 1.

Veteran investigators said they could not recall a similar effort to locate a plane's recorders; these could contain information that is critical to solving the mystery of the downed Airbus A330.

"I can't think of any one event where there's been more than one military naval organization out there hunting for them," said Greg Feith, a former investigator at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

The vessels hunting for pings around the clock make up just part of the armada of surface ships and aircraft involved in the search and recovery effort, which includes at least 11 ships, 10 planes and two helicopters from four countries. The Brazilian military has more than 1,000 personnel devoted to the search.

As daunting and improbable as it seems to find tiny boxes in a huge ocean, especially with the crash site still uncertain, searchers almost always recover them, air safety experts said.


Of 20 total airplane crashes in water over the past 30 years, in only one case was neither recorder found during the crash investigation, said Curt Lewis, president of Curt Lewis & Associates, a safety and risk management consulting firm. In one other case, one of the two recorders was recovered, and in two instances he was not able to determine whether they were ever found, he said.

But this search is more difficult than most. French investigators are searching an area with a 50-mile radius and water depths exceeding 15,000 feet. Most airliner crashes over water have been along coastal waters or along the continental shelf, said Paul Hayes, air safety director of Ascend, an aviation consulting company in London.

"This is pushing the envelope," he said. "Because of the depth of the water, this may be the accident where they fail to do it."

Searchers are also pressed heavily for time. The boxes transmit signals for about 30 days before the signals start to fade. The batteries in the boxes on the Air France flight may have less than two weeks of life left.

[u-5075]

The short version:
Black box search

The short version:
Black box search likely to end around 15 JUL 2009

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/b ... -d0kq.html

Black box search

June 28, 2009
THE search for the black boxes of the Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean is expected to continue, even though their audio beacons are likely to fade.

Brazil has halted the search for bodies and debris after recovering 51 bodies. Two hundred and twenty-eight people were on board the plane when it went down on June 1.

Aviation experts say the flight recorders may be key to determining what brought the airliner down but signals fade after about 30 days. American air force officers said the search for the flight recorders was likely to continue for 12 to 15 days after the 30-day limit.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald