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Thanks to Sunken Civ and Army Air Corps for the heads up.
Would any of you aviation experts be able to tell us what are the chances of locating and retrieving the black boxes?
Where was the last tracking of the plane on Radar?
I'm not expert, I was just an avionics bitch, that specialized in EW and ECM, but you should have 30 days from when the boxes hit the water until the pingers quit. And you should have a footprint on where to look. The footprint will be large... Hundreds of square miles.
National assets may be able to narrow that, but will take weeks to release the info.
If I was betting. I'd say it's doable. If I had to do it, I'd want the national asset info before I committed to finding it.
/johnny
The radar horizon for an airliner only extends a couple hundred miles, 250 miles at the most. After that you lose sight of the aircraft below the horizon. (There are military “over the horizon” radar, but that technology is not used for civilian ATC.) Radar coverage over the Atlantic in quite sparse.
I haven’t worked in ATC in a while, but we used to sell passive tracking systems to some countries that allowed the aircraft to continuously send its position about once a minute to ATC, sort of a poor man’s radar. A lot of ships use a similar system, they radio their position via satellite once a minute to an international registry in London, which can help resolve insurance claims. I would surprized if the airline industry doesn’t have a similar system, including satellite emergency beacons.