Search teams in the Atlantic Ocean could begin retrieving bodies and wreckage within weeks from the Air France passenger jet that crashed nearly two years ago with 228 people on board, investigators said Monday.
After three previous search attempts came up empty, searchers over the weekend located Flight 447 on a relatively flat stretch of the ocean floor at a depth of 12,800 feet, Jean-Paul Troadec, the director of France’s Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses, or BEA, said.
Sophisticated underwater robots have already taken thousands of photos of engines, landing gear and a portion of the fuselage. These submarines have also found “many” human remains, the BEA’s chief investigator Alain Bouillard said.
“I’m very euphoric,” said Winifried Schmidt, whose daughter was on the flight. “I couldn’t sleep all night over the news coverage.”
Schmidt said that the recovery gives him and other families of victims hope that investigators will finally be able to say what caused the June 1, 2009, crash. Even more important, he said, was the discovery of human remains.
“The top priority, from a victims’ families standpoint, is that they recover the corpses so we can have a burial,” he said.
Like most victims, the body of his daughter, Julia Miranda-Schmidt, 27, was not one of those that were recovered from the ocean surface shortly after the crash.
The “first priority” for accident investigators is to locate the Airbus A330’s two crash-proof black boxes. The recorders, which capture sounds in the cockpit and a dense data stream of how the plane is operating, are located in the jet’s tail section.
So far, the images of twisted wreckage on the ocean floor have not shed any new light on what caused the Rio de Janeiro-to-Paris flight to go down, Bouillard said.
Based on a few maintenance messages transmitted minutes before the crash and the few pieces of the aircraft found floating on the surface, the BEA believes that speed sensors became clogged with ice after the jet flew into a thunderstorm.
That, in turn, gave the pilots erroneous speed readings and triggered the autopilot to shut off.
There is a “high likelihood” that the data from the recorders can be retrieved if they are located, said Mike Poole, the flight recorder working group chairman for the International Society of Air Safety Investigators.
Flight recorders are certified to withstand water pressure as deep as 20,000 feet, Poole said.
The BEA’s Troadec cautioned that modern solid-state recorders such as those on the Airbus jet have never had to withstand the high pressures on the ocean floor for so long.
If the recorders cannot be located or did not work, it could require investigators to retrieve portions of the plane in a search for clues about what happened, he said.
Recorders contain a vast wealth of data that has proven increasingly critical to accident investigations, but they are not always very useful.
In the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York, the recorders offered little help to investigators because they stopped working when the jet’s fuel tank exploded. That accident was solved by more old-fashioned sleuthing of chunks of wreckage.
Air France-KLM Group Chief Executive Officer Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said in a statement that the discovery of the jet “gives hope” that the cause of the accident will be determined.
“We do hope that this discovery will lead to the retrieval and the reading of the two recorders because these data are essential for the understanding of this accident,” Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath said.
(Source: USA Today)
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an echo of what was perhaps the most elaborate, and most slipshod case of a Fed cover up in the present era. There is great distance between the conspiracy theorist, and the intelligent weighing of data. In this sad case, the composite of maligned and silenced witnesses, the almost comical and transparent government dance of actors and changing conflicted statements, doom the government story to status of a gilded big lie. While many citizens are as stupid or compliant as suits the govt, most are not.