Thursday - May 12, 2011

Air Crash Data: Wait Another Week

LE BOURGET, France – France’s chief air accident investigator said Thursday he’s hopeful that data contained on the two flight recorders of an Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic almost two years ago can be recovered.

Jean-Paul Troadec, head of France’s BEA, told reporters that the so-called black boxes “appear to be in good shape.”

“I’m fairly confident” they can be used, he said in response to a question.

The man in charge of the BEA’s engineering department, Christophe Menez, said it would take at least three days to learn with certainty whether information contained on the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder can be recovered to help unlock the cause of the crash.

Other parts of the plane discovered in the ocean’s depths — some not yet brought to France — can also contribute to learning why Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into the Atlantic on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people aboard.

Deciphering all the information can take weeks or months, said Alain Bouillard, director of the investigation.

“This process isn’t counted in days. It is counted in weeks or months,” he said.

The data recorders arrived under high security at BEA headquarters outside Paris on Thursday.

I thought this was going to be a bigger post than it turned out to be. Using deep sea robot submersibles from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI, “hoo wee!") searchers found the location of the downed airliner a couple weeks ago. At this point they have located most of the wreckage on the sea floor, 2 miles down. Even though the crash happened 2 years ago, bodies have been found still in their seats. Two bodies have been recovered for DNA testing, but the rest will probably stay there. Some family members want them to stay, some want them to leave. Both the black boxes were located and retrieved a few days ago, and have now been returned to France for examination. Conservators are optimist about their chances of getting the data, but it will take time to get the salt off and to dry out the circuit boards. So it’s still a matter of wait and see.

From what I can glean from the articles I have read, it appears that the plane belly flopped into the ocean. To me that means either a tremendous downdraft swatted the plane out of the sky, or that they suffered a complete loss of engines and power and stalled, and then fell straight down out of the sky. Whatever caused the crash happened so quickly that the oxygen masks did not have time to deploy. The force of the impact was enough to knock the flight recorder instruments out of their black box container ( which is actually orange ) but those instruments were found and retrieved a day later.

Air France and Airbus are spending another $12.5 million on this recovery effort, after spending $28 million on 3 previous searches. A French judge has filed preliminary manslaughter charges against the airline and the aircraft company, which seems proactively douchey to me. Only about 50 bodies were recovered from the surface at the time of the crash.

http://www.turnto23.com/travelgetaways/27864330/detail.html
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?col=&section=international&xfile=data/international/2011/May/international_May132.xml
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42414150/ns/world_news-europe/t/bodies-air-france-crash-found-sea/
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/04/undersea-robots-locate-bodies-motors-200-air-france-crash/
http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/05/02/49723219.html
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-04-21/air-france-black-box-search-harnesses-hollywood-for-crash-clues.html

Posted by Drew458     on 05/12/2011 at 09:49 AM   
Filed Under: • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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