The flight recorders from Air France Flight 447 could be scattered nearly anywhere across a vast undersea mountain range that lies as much as 6.4km below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
In those remote, forbidding waters between Brazil and West Africa, variations in temperature and salinity can reduce visibility and obscure homing signals from the devices. And for salvage crews, time is short because the “black boxes” will only emit signals for a month.
Search planes and ships located more debris from the Airbus A330 on Wednesday, but high seas and heavy winds delayed the arrival of deep-water submersibles that could be used to find wreckage on the ocean floor.
The head of France’s accident investigation agency, Paul-Louis Arslanian, said he was “not optimistic” that officials would ever recover the flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder from the plane, which disappeared on Sunday night minutes after flying into a dangerous band of storms. The cause of the crash is still a mystery.
Water in the area is said to run as deep as 7,000m, possibly prohibiting the use of manned submersibles.
Instead, remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, will probably be used because they are better equipped to withstand immense water pressures.
“Even ROV equipment can hardly work at those depths, but it remains the best available option,” said Tor Norstegard, an investigator with Norway’s aviation accident investigation board and an expert in recovery of wreckage from the North Sea.
“It’s one thing to go down to look at things, but it’s a much greater problem to take equipment down in order to bring up pieces of wreckage,” he said.
Investigators are relying heavily on the plane’s automated messages to help reconstruct what happened to the jet as it flew through towering thunderstorms. They detail a series of failures that end with its systems shutting down, suggesting the plane broke apart in the sky, said an aviation industry official with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the crash.
The pilot sent a manual signal at 11pm local time saying he was flying through an area of “CBs” — black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning.
Ten minutes later, a cascade of problems began: Automatic messages indicate 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.
Three minutes after that, more automatic messages reported the failure of systems to monitor air speed, altitude and direction.
The last automatic message, at 11:14pm, signaled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure — catastrophic events in a plane that was likely already plunging toward the ocean.
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