Great news for the investigation of Flight 447. It looks like the search for the data recorders will resume next year. Although the chances are slim, it’s better than nothing.
France is preparing to spend as much as €20 million next year on a renewed search for the flight data recorders and undersea wreckage of the Air France A330 jetliner that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June, killing all 228 people aboard, the new head of the French agency charged with investigating the accident said Monday.
The news comes amid mounting tension within Air France as the airline prepares for an external audit of its flight safety procedures next month.
The agency, the Bureau of Investigations and Analyses, has begun preparing for a third attempt to locate the black boxes of Air France Flight 447 that it expects will begin early next year, with the support of experts and specialized equipment from the United States, Britain, Brazil and Russia, said Jean-Paul Troadec, who took over as head of the agency this month.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
I am not a specialist in search and rescue operations, so i was wondering how is it even barely possible to find black boxes within such huge area, after half of a year and with pingers turned off ? To be honest it sound like “we should do something so they cannot accuse us in omission”. I hope , i am wrong…
If this takes place, how will the blackbox be found? Deep sea exploration for the wreck? The box wouldn’t be giving off any sounds now.
The chances of finding said data recorders would be so close to zero that it would be considered negligible, regardless of how much money is being funded, as sad as that is. It sounds insensitive, but why not be spending that amount of money towards implementing a real-time data streaming system, so we can be virtually guaranteed of this never happening again??
Joanna, the main problem with sending real time data from the aircraft is bandwidth. The data is about the same as a high quality audio feed, and must be sent continuously. This is very hard to do when your only link is via satellite. A far simpler solution would be to place two or three small modules maybe 35 mm in diameter and 200 mm in length on each wingtip and the top of the tail, (areas with highest chance of survival). These modules would contain only a micro-controller, cell phone, GPS receiver, and a flash ram. For attachment to the aircraft hey would have only an ethernet cable, a water pressure release, and minimal thermal insulation. In a crash the surviving modules would float to the surface, and could be contacted via cell phone. The last 24 hours of flight data, and voice data would be on the flash ram.
What a shame that immediately after this tragedy French officials publicly stated they will never be able to find the boxes. They do not want to find the boxes. Airbus planes fall out of the sky and the government rolls the dice. The valuable lives lost deserve better.
Although I understand the comments above, I must say that had I or anyone I know been on that aircraft, there could be no amount to large to spend to find that aircraft and the cause for it going down. Rough weather, ok, but I think that if we can find the freagin Titanic, 100 years later, we better be able to find this aircraft and it’s blackbox. We have to many people on too many aircraft every single day, not to know what happened, we owe it to them, and to any who flys in the future to fix whatever problem occured.
After the first week of search & rescue, I couldnt’ believe how botched the first search phase was. They had TWO boxes emitting pings for several kms and despite the large area, with a large enough team, that should be do-able. They already knew the general area due to mapping the debris already found.
But the search of phase 1 was simply too little too late. You can’t expect ONE submarine and 2 tug boats to cover such a large area in one week. It took them so damn long to get the submarine out there and searching, as I read the reports I was screaming at the computer moniter to send the whole freaking fleet even if they had to or pay for the entire US Navy. The pingers had probably already stopped pinging by the time they started searching. Why were no journalists getting on the case about that? It’s almost as if they didn’t want to find it because they were afraid of what they might find (that the scarebus has firmware issues).
I promise you, had this been Air Force One, there would have been entire fleets of submarines and ships searching the entire Atlantic.
Either way, despite the immense challenge now, I don’t see why they can’t still find this given the right people with the right equipment and enough time. The titantic was found at 4km and black boxes have been recovered at similar depths, why should this any different? They have mapped wreckage data go by; http://blog.flightstory.net/wp-content/uploads/af447-map-debris-and-bodies.jpg and everything, so it’s not like they have to scoure the entire Atlantic ocean.
I think this is really interesting and BEA opened an investigation about it.CHECK THIS OUT:
http://avherald.com/h?article=42380873&opt=0
http monmexique com/AirFrance-complaint-Cook-Country pdf
Hello,
Not yet posted by the webmaster (appaling) but it’s from 17 December 2009 a second BEA report released to the public !
http://www.bea.aero/en/enquetes/flight.af.447/flight.af.447.php
Hello,
That’s a interesting presentation (PPS)
Significants events
http://henrimarnetcornus.20minutes-blogs.fr/media/02/00/1981295835.pps
No depressurisation??!I thought the last ACARS message said there was a sudden loss of cabin pressure?
No, the message sayed, that there was a high rate of descend _or_ a sudden loss of cabin pressure. Now we know for shure, that it was descend – related.
Just a guess after the reading of this second report:
A uncontrolled stall or a uncontrolled spin.
Well that would make sense. It was found to have gone down in one piece- so you could assume there was no sudden decrease in pressure?
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2009/1222/Air-France-crash-still-a-mystery-new-search-for-black-boxes
From the Christan Science Monitor 12/22