Breakthrough in Air France crash black box search

Reuters ^ | 5/06/2010 | Reuters

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

France has found what could be the first concrete clues to the location of black boxes missing from last year's Atlantic jet disaster, but warned on Thursday there was no guarantee the breakthrough would lead to their recovery.The defense ministry said the boost had come through detailed follow-up analysis of sonar readings taken in the first few weeks after an Air France jet crashed into the Atlantic killing 228 people on June 1 last year.

Finding the black boxes is seen as essential to help crash experts and relatives understand exactly what caused flight 447 to plunge into a remote part of the Atlantic during an equatorial storm on its journey from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

"It is probably the signal (of the boxes)," said General Christian Baptiste, deputy spokesman at the Defense Ministry.

The discovery of a possible 'ping' from at least one of the recorders on board the Airbus A330 has allowed experts to narrow the search to a few square kilometers from several thousand ahead of the anniversary of the airline's worst crash.

[Erik Latranyi]

A very mysterious crash. I hope they can find those boxes for the sake of the families.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

I hope so too.

[maggief]

Coverup!

[ncfool]

brought down by Islamic torourist’s.

[sionnsar]

Not sure what a "Islamic torourist’s" is of (you did not complete the possessive), but I doubt it. There has been a fairly persuasive chronology based on known evidence published a short while back, one that begins with pitot tube failure (icing) and continues with a certain apparent shortcoming of Airbus' control systems, right down to a high-speed ocean crash.

But I, on the other hand, believe it to be an incidental side-effect of the creation of crop circles.

[Tolsti2]

People love to blame air crashes on human causes like this, twa800, and the polish thing. The fact is, air travel isn’t all that terribly safe and things happen like this. They break up and go down with horrible suffering like the Air Alaska and dozens and dozens of others. It’s a false sense of security that gets violated and people freak.