About the crash of Air France flight 447The A330-300 aircraft was on a scheduled international flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France.
The aircraft departed late on 31 May 2009 from Rio, and crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of 1 June 2009. The crash occurred about three hours and 45 minutes after takeoff, in an area of the Atlantic Ocean about 435 nautical miles north-northeast of Fernando de Noronha island. There were no emergency or distress messages sent by the crew, though there were numerous automatically generate maintenance messages that were sent by the aircraft back to Air France.
Debris from the aircraft was found near the estimated position of its last radio communication. There were 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board, representing 32 nationalities. A total of 50 bodies were recovered from the ocean, and the remaining passengers and crew are missing and presumed dead.
A runaway mini-sub temporarily halted progress on the French government’s search of the Atlantic for the black boxes from Air France Flight 447. The remote operated underwater vessel, the Remus, is part of a team of recovery watercraft hired by the French as they investigate last June's crash of an
Airbus 330.
On April 9th, the Remus mini-sub surfaced and moved 62 miles before it could be recovered and returned to the search site.
The French aircraft accident investigation bureau the
Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) is almost three weeks into its latest effort to find the flight data and cockpit voice recorder from the jetliner that disappeared mysteriously on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris June 1, 2009. Two hundred and twenty eight people were killed.
The BEA reported last week that the team of two work ships, the 260 foot crane equipped
Seabed Worker and the 230-foot supply and load-line vessel the
Anne Candies, three remote-operated subs and a sonar tow has accomplished a search of 1800 square miles of the Atlantic.
In addition to the delay resulting from the runaway sub, the agency reported rain and stormy weather but good search conditions.
At the time the jetliner fell into the ocean, it was traveling at an altitude of 35,000 feet and was too far from land to use radio communications. A satellite system on the aircraft designed to report certain maintenance and aircraft information to dispatchers on the ground, sent several error messages.
Investigators seeking to discover what went wrong, have little to go on beyond these communications and some of the wreckage that has been found. Their eagerness to find the flight data recorder that documents the plane’s flight information and cockpit voice recorder detailing the crew conversations can be seen by the amount of time and money that has gone into the search of the Atlantic. Before this latest effort, an estimated $40 million had been spent by the governments of France, Brazil and the United States.
The crash has prompted calls for the use of new technology to keep airplanes in communication with the ground even on flights operating over remote areas. As
Christine Negroni reported in an article in The New York Times, last month, European air safety agencies sent a letter to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) asking that the international body mandate that commercial airliners regularly send basic flight information such as heading, altitude, speed and location to a receiving station off the airplane.
In an interview last month with
AirDat, a company that equips airliners with satellite systems to transmit meteorological information, Jay Ladd the chief executive told me the kind of information useful for investigators of the Air France disaster could be obtained using weather reporting systems already deployed.
“If we had our typical sensor on the plane, as it encountered turbulence, we’d be getting a rapid stream of information and we’d know where the plane was, we’d have an exact position and altitude for that plane when it last recorded data.”
Ladd’s company is not the only one looking at ways to incorporate on airplanes, the kind of high tech solutions already in use by teenagers twittering about their every activity.
Mr. Ladd told me, “We would like to be pro active and start tracking airplanes, even without ICAO intervention.”
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About Christine NegroniAirSafeNews.com is pleased to welcome Christine Negroni as a guest contributor. Her reporting appears in The New York Times and many other publications. She has worked as a network television correspondent for CBS News and CNN. She is also a published author. Her book, Deadly Departure, on the crash of TWA Flight 800, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her upcoming book
The Crash Detectives goes in-depth into the world of transportation accident investigation.
Photo Credits: A330 Accident aircraft photo by Garret Lockhart / Houstonspotters.net
