United States and France Continue Search for Air France Black Box

by Rob Walker | June 8, 2009 at 06:09 am

186 views | 22 Recommendations | 1 comment

A United States underwater team has arrived off the coast of Brazil to assist a French nuclear submarine in the search for the black box of Air France flight 447. The Airbuss A330 went down last week with 228 people on board, so far only 17 bodies have been recovered.

The French nuclear sub is due to arrive on Wednesday to help with the search for the black box, which may provide clues as to why the plane crashed. A small French research submarine, which helped rediscover the Titanic, is also on the way to search.

Search teams are struggling to find the "black box" flight recorders which will broadcast a locator signal for up to 30 days.
The US Navy team uses special underwater listening devices which can detect emergency beacons to a depth of 20,000 feet.

A French nuclear submarine is due on Wednesday to arrive and search for the flight recording devices. The US navy is also contributing two towable "pinger" locators which will attempt to pick up the homing beacons emitted by the boxes.

Meanwhile, Airbus is replacing air-speed sensors on a number of Airbus SAS A330 planes that are similar to the one that crashed off the coast of Brazil. The changes were made 'out of an abundance of caution', not because that was the cause of the crash.

Unreliable data from sensors may have triggered a chain of events leading to the June 1 Air France plane crash that killed 228 people, France’s chief crash investigator said. Salvage teams have recovered 17 bodies from Air France Flight 447 and more have been spotted, while “dozens” of structural components have been salvaged, Brazilian Air Force Colonel Henry Munhoz said yesterday.