Monday, May 16, 2011

Retrieve information from the black boxes of Ro-Paris flight

The Office of French Research and Analysis (BEA, its acronym in French), charged with investigating the crash of Air France flight 447 on June 1, 2009 fell mysteriously into the Atlantic in mid-flight from Rio to Paris with 228 people on board, announced today that it has been possible to recover all the data from black boxes.

These were rescued earlier this month to about 3,900 meters deep, where they remained for nearly two years, and have begun to be studied this weekend on the outskirts of Paris. The complete data analysis will take several weeks and an initial study published during the summer. "After the opening operations, extraction, cleaning and drying of the memory cards of the flight recorders, data have been read during the weekend," BEA has announced in a statement.

"These readings have collected all the data in the recorder (...) parameters and the integrity of (...) phonic recordings of the last two hours of flight." Now the BEA will treat this information, a task that will last "several weeks", after which the Office will publish a first progress report that "made public during the summer." The two boxes, one with technical data, such as height, speed and flight path and the second with the recording of sounds, including conversations between the pilot and his team and other sounds recorded in the cabin, reached the Paris last week where they are being examined.

They were rescued when they had lost almost all hope of finding them on 3 May, after remaining for 23 months on the ocean floor. Therefore, BEA experts have spent the weekend working to remove the memory card from its packaging and remove any excess water and salt, with no certainty about the possibility of being able to save the information.

Analysis of these data should shed some light on the exact causes of the accident, still unknown. The research, in the absence of information from black boxes, had revealed problems with speed probes called Pitot probes but the experts felt that this was just one of the elements that had caused the accident.

The first findings will be published this summer and further study should be ready by early next year.

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