Investigators seeking to explain why Air France flight 447 plunged into the night ocean two years ago will rely on gear pioneered by telecommunications and oil companies as well as a Hollywood director to unlock the mystery.
The wreckage of the Airbus SAS A330 jet was discovered this month 3,900 meters (12,800 feet) deep in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil after multiple searches. Few aircraft salvage missions have probed the same depth, where the sea is perfectly black, temperatures approach freezing and water pressure is equal to the weight of a car on a postage stamp.
Diving deeper than the Titanic’s final resting place, a robot tethered to a surface ship will sift through the aircraft debris in search of the two flight recorders bolted inside the tail of the fuselage. Their data promises the best chance yet to explain the crash, the deadliest in Air France’s history. Complicating the mission is the presence of numerous bodies, some still strapped into their seats and preserved by the cold water and lack of oxygen or light.
“At that depth, it is pitch black, and the difficulty is knowing where you are while keeping track of things,” said Dave Gallo, director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Research Institute in Falmouth, Massachusetts, whose robots helped locate and map the wreckage. “It’s a question of operational skill.”
No Survivors
The Airbus disappeared en route to Paris from Rio De Janeiro on June 1, 2009, leaving no survivors among the 228 aboard. While some fragments and bodies were recovered from the surface of the sea, most of the jet remained missing until this month. The data recorders are built to withstand submersion and extreme impact, though until retrieved there is no certainty the data they stored will be readable.
The expedition will gather at the port in Dakar in Senegal tomorrow, before traversing the Atlantic on the Ile de Sein vessel to the location of the aircraft, about 435 nautical miles off the coast of Brazil.
French phone-equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent SA is providing the 140-meter ship, which normally lays deep-sea cables. Aboard will be 70 people, including members of the French BEA air accident authority, investigators from the UK and Brazil, experts from Airbus and Air France, as well as one psychologist. Family members of the victims were not permitted aboard.
Robot Submarines
Underwater engineering company Phoenix International Holdings Inc. is sending one of its two “Remora” robotic submarines, or ROVs, equipped with high-resolution cameras and two manipulator arms. The basket on the ROV can recover as much as 200 kilograms (440 pounds ) of debris in a single mission.
“There are about six to eight ROVs in the world capable of descending as deep” as the Remora, said Tim Janaitis, business development manager at Phoenix, who spoke from Largo, Maryland. Typically, the robot’s missions include work on deep-sea oil drilling, and a recent descent took the vehicle to the Titanic wreck in the northern Atlantic, Janaitis said.
