Slashdot Mirror
Mystery Air Crash Black Box Found Sans Memory Part
coondoggie writes "The ongoing undersea search of the Air France Flight 447 wreckage had yielded one of the key items investigators were looking for this week: the flight data recorder. Unfortunately, their hopes for more information about the crash were set back, as the robot subs scouring the ocean floor retrieved the box only to find its memory part missing."
There is a technical term for it, but basically it's the actual box on the recorder chasis which stores the data; I'm not sure whether it's magnetic storage or flash memory in this case.
And separation is certainly not unknown, there was a crash a few years back where it also separated and was later found. Odds are this one will be too, but that could take some time if it's buried under other debris.
From the article, it sounds like the flight data recorder has basically been smashed to pieces. This is usually what happens to them; they're really only useful in relatively low-speed accidents.
That's not the case at all. FDRs commonly survive catastrophic high speed accidents. For example, USAir 427 in 1994 crashed in a near vertical nose-down attitude, and pretty much all that was left of that accident was small bits and pieces. The FDR was recovered and was usable. They rolled and went nose down from 6,000 feet, and the last data on the recorder indicated an airspeed of 261 knots (300 mph, or about 135 meters per second), at a 80 nose-down attitude, virtually straight into the ground. If an FDR can survive that, it can survive damn near anything.