Wreckage field from AF447 found

[folti78]

Previously

Air France 447 search yields fresh hope with discovery of debris on seabed

Robot submarines locate wreckage from still unexplained disaster but flight recorders remain missing
Ben Quinn and agencies
The Guardian, Monday 4 April 2011

Pieces of wreckage from an Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic in 2009 with 228 people on board have been recovered by underwater teams, according to French investigators.

A fourth attempt began last month to locate remains of the aircraft, and particularly its flight recorders, in the hope of determining the cause of the still unexplained disaster.

The wreckage was recovered at the weekend by a salvage vessel equipped with unmanned submarines, the French air accident investigation agency, the BEA, said on Sunday night. The agency said the pieces were identified as parts of flight 447, which crashed on 1 June 2009 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

In what was the worst loss of life involving an Air France plane in the firm's 75-year history, those who died included more than 30 nationalities. Search operations that took place in the wake of the crash led to the recovery of 50 bodies as well as hundreds of pieces of the aircraft, including its torn-off tail, but the last search ended in May 2010 after it had failed to find the plane's voice and data recorders.

The latest search, which is being carried out using a deep-sea vessel called Alucia and is being financed by the plane's manufacturers, Air France and Airbus, has been designed to cover an area of approximately 3,900 sq miles.

Robotic equipment has been used to forage in depths of up to 4,000 metres in an area of the ocean floor between Africa and Brazil. Finding the black boxes is seen as essential to help crash experts and relatives understand why flight 447 plunged into a remote part of the Atlantic during an equatorial storm.

"This is very good news because it brings with it the hope that at last we will get some information on what caused this accident, which to this day remains unexplained," Air France-KLM's chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said.

Speculation about the cause of the crash has focused on the possible icing-up of the aircraft's speed sensors, which appeared to give inconsistent readings seconds before the plane vanished. But an accident report said it was impossible to establish a clear cause without further data held in the missing recorders.

"We do hope that the discovery will lead to the retrieval and reading of the two recorders because this data is essential for the understanding of this accident," said a spokesman for Airbus.

A passenger jet carries two recorders, one for cockpit voices and another to log data from the aircraft's systems.

Air France and Airbus were both placed under formal investigation over the crash last month as part of a French criminal investigation into the causes of the crash. Groups representing victims' families have criticised the way previous searches were carried out.

TL;DR: fourth search mission funded by Air France found a roughly 600x200m debris field containing the remains of the crashed airliner, including bodies of passengers (which started another row about the bodies' possible recovery).
The field located on an underwater plain 4000m below. No sign of the black boxes yet.

The size of the debris and the density of the field indicates, that the plane hit water tail first with relatively low speed.

Pics of the debris released by the French air safety agency BEA.

[Broomstick]

They are planning to retrieve as much as possible from the ocean floor, but such a retrieval will take some planning and equipment. Last I heard it will probably be a month before major recovery efforts begin.

The bodies are apparently in pretty bad condition. Which shouldn't be too surprising.

Finding so much of the wreckage gives hope the black boxes can be found, but you know, the actual boxes themselves aren't very big. If they are found, however there is a high likelihood the data will be intact, as useful information has been retrieved from such recorders immersed in salt water for 2-3 times longer than the Air France ones have been.

I just hope that if they do find those flight recorders the information is helpful. It should be, but until the data is found and analysed one never knows for certain.