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AF 447 Flight Recorder Found In the Atlantic

Posted by timothy on from the famous-memory-part dept.

romiz writes "The memory of the flight recorder for the Air France 447 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed on June 1st 2009, has been found on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, and brought back to the surface in good shape. This is the data recorder, which saves the flight parameters. The search is still continuing in hope of finding the voice recorder containing the sounds recorded in the plane's cockpit."

4 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Needle in a Hay Stack by cdrudge · · Score: 5, Funny

    All the way.

  2. gps? on the ocean floor? by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    turn in your nerd credentials for thinking that would work

    additionally, flight data recorders do send out a ping for 30 days:

    http://boingboing.net/2009/06/03/miles-obrien-bloggin.html

    The submersible will be listening for the distinctive "pinging" noise that these boxes are designed to emit once they are submerged in water. They are supposed to "ping" for thirty days in water as deep as 20,000 feet. Sonar used by surface ships is only good to about a thousand feet of depth - so it is essential to send some "ears" deep beneath the sea in order to find the boxes. These sonar devices can be towed by ships or ply the deep on their own power.

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  3. Re:I don't get this by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does somebody know why it's so hard for them to find it? I would assume that it's properly secured against crashes, and has a GPS/transmitter on board? What causes this to be so hard?

    Inside the data recorder it's attached to a pinger which sends out a sound pulse on a regular basis for about a month after a crash; that makes it easy to find if the recorder stays intact and it's in relatively shallow water, but in this case it's so far down that the pinger was barely audible during the first search (it wasn't detected during the search and only found by post-search processing of the recorded audio data) and the various layers in the ocean reflect sound so it's hard to track. Obviously the batteries died long ago so the only way to find it now was to look for an orange cylinder on the seabed.

  4. Re:Amazing by Aardpig · · Score: 4, Funny

    In fact, finding a needle in a haystack is trivial. Douse the whole stack in gas, torch it, and then run a strong electromagnet over the ash.

    --
    Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.