Friday, June 5, 2009

Diving Robots Could Recover Air France 447's Black Box


From Popular Mechanics:

As details of the telemetry sent by Air France 447 in its final minutes become known, deep-sea technology experts are saying that the recovery of the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder and digital flight data recorder—the black boxes—will be difficult, but not impossible, with the help of deep-sea-diving robots.


After officials pinpointed the location of Air France's Airbus A330 crash site, they turned to the difficult task of recovering the black boxes, which hold the official recordings of events that happened before the plane went down. Black boxes, which are actually painted orange, can give investigators the missing bits and pieces of data needed to determine an accident's probable cause. To help officials find the boxes, embedded technology sends sonarlike signals, which can be detected for up to 30 days provided listening equipment can get within approximately 1 mile of the box, according to a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board. In the case of Flight 447, the crash area in the Atlantic Ocean is too deep for divers to reach.

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