Black box from 2009 Air France Crash Found

[RamboLiberal]

Source: CBS News

France's air accident investigation agency says an undersea search has located the flight data recorder from the 2009 Air France flight that went down in the mid-Atlantic.

In a statement, the BEA said the black box was "localized and identified" on Sunday morning.

The statement included photos of the recorder - a red cylinder partially buried in sand on the sea floor.

Investigators hope that the black box will help determine what caused the June 1, 2009 crash of Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to the French capital, Paris.




Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/01/501364/main20058760.shtml?tag=stack

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The memory unit that may tell why an Air France jet plunged into the Atlantic nearly two years ago was recovered from the bottom of the ocean Sunday, France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) said.

A remote-controlled submarine, known as the Remora 6000, located the memory unit Sunday morning and it was lifted on board the search ship Ile de Sein six hours later, the Paris-based BEA said.

All 228 people aboard the Air France Flight 447 were killed when the plane fell into the ocean on the way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009.

The submarine found the orange-colored flight data recorder's chassis Wednesday, the second day of an operation that also hopes to retrieve bodies from the wreckage site. The memory unit was part of the recorder, but was not attached when it was found.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/05/01/air.france.447.recorder/index.html?hpt=T1

[Xipe Totec]

1. What flag is the Remora 6000? nt

[Brother Buzz]

14. The remote-controlled submarine was launched from a ship flying a French flag

[Drale]

2. Thats crazy that they found the Blackbox after all this time

PS. I always wondered why its called a black box when its actually orange.

[SoapBox]

10. My understanding as to why it is called the "black box" is because...

...it is really only examined in the event of death.

[Xithras]

18. Most sites on the Internet get this one wrong. It's an engineering term.

Technically, there are a lot of black boxes on an aircraft. "Black box" is simply an engineering term (especially electrical and electronic engineering) for a sealed or closed electronic device with limited and fixed inputs and outputs. A flight data recorder is a black box system because neither the airline or the airplane manufacturer really does anything to it...they receive it sealed from the manufacturer, plug it into the planes inputs, and let it run. It's a generic term for a sealed piece of replaceable equipment.

It's derived from the more even generic scientific term "black box", which simply refers to any system where we understand the inputs and outputs, but either don't know or don't care about how the system itself works internally.

After flight data recorders started showing up on planes, investigative engineers looking at crash sites began referring to data from "flight recorder black boxes". Non-engineering media-types, not understanding the source of the term, started using "black boxes" as a more general name for the devices, and it stuck.

[originalpckelly]

3. That is so weird, I just watched a documentary on this crash a few days ago.

They believe these devices called pitot (said pee-toe) tubes became clogged with supercooled water. (Supercooled water is water below 32* F, but it is still liquid because it has no impurities around which to form new crystals. Once it contacts something, like a pitot tube, it will instantly turn into ice.) They help measure speed, and without these the autopilot disengaged (for lack of data on the speed of the aircraft.) Or at least that was the theory of the crash investigators in the program. Seems to make sense, because other planes of that model have had the same problem.

It was also due to pilot error, because even though the pilots didn't have any way of knowing how fast they were going, they could have just used the thrust levers and the pitch of the aircraft to set a speed within the speed envelope of the airplane (an Airbus 330, I believe).

They also said that it was perhaps an example of why automation in newer commercial airliners is not always a good thing, because the pilots don't really fly any of these planes anymore, even when they are off of autopilot, there is still a system that controls the airplane. This is the system that could not operate during the emergency, because it was missing the vital information of speed.

It suggests that they should have a back-up system, like GPS, to help determine speed. There might also be a way to monitor accelerations on the aircraft to determine speed as well.

It quite scared me, to be very honest.

[JohnyCanuck]

9. using the thrust levers and the pitch of the aircraft to set a speed

Might be easier said than done perhaps when the aircraft is being repeatedly tossed around (causing frequent pitch changes) and at the same time repeatedly losing and gaining gobs of altitude in the updrafts and downdrafts of a major thunderstorm which it appears the Air France flight was probably experiencing at the time of the crash.

I am not a commercial pilot and my flying days as a private pilot are long past, but from my days as a student pilot training in single engine Cessnas I remember the warnings that were drilled into us by our flight instructors and ground school instructors, "Never knowingly or willingly fly into a thunderstorm because the turbulence and associated windshears and violent updrafts/downdrafts inside a thunderstorm could easily be enough to either make you lose control or overstress the airframe past design limits." Most commercial aircraft can easily fly over or around thunderstorms using onboard weather radar and/or guidance from ATC. It looks like this flight encountered a line of powerful thunderstorms which stretched significantly higher than their cruising altitude and they may have somehow become caught up in one.

A meteorological analysis of the area surrounding the flight path showed a mesoscale convective system extending to an altitude of around 50,000 feet (15 km; 9.5 mi) above the Atlantic Ocean before Flight 447 disappeared.<39> From satellite images taken near the time of the incident, it appears that the aircraft encountered a thunderstorm, likely containing significant turbulence.<40>

Detailed analysis of the weather conditions for the flight shows it is possible that the aircraft's final 12 minutes could have been spent "flying through significant turbulence and thunderstorm activity for about 75 mi (121 km)", and may have been subjected to rime icing, and possibly clear ice or graupel.<39> Satellite imagery loops from the CIMSS clarify that the flight was coping with a series of storms, not just one.<41>

Commercial air transport crews routinely encounter this type of storm in this area. Generally, when storms of this type are encountered at night, pilots use onboard radar to navigate around them.<42>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

[mahatmakanejeeves]

16. "... I just watched a documentary on this crash a few days ago."

I saw that too, though it was a few months back around here.

NOVA | Crash of Flight 447

As is said later, finding that recorder is such a marvelous achievement. Since the picture indicates the ship belongs to Alcatel Lucent, I guess it is used for laying or maintaining communication cable on the ocean floor.

[Baclava]

4. They found the Flight Data Recorder, excellent!

"BEA officials have warned that the recordings may yet prove unusable, considering the pressure they were subjected to for two years..We can't say in advance that we're going to be able to read it until it's been opened," a BEA spokeswoman."

"The flight data recorder stores technical data from the flight. Another so-called black box records cockpit conversations. The second black box has not yet been found, but the submarine probes were continuing..."

[originalpckelly]

5. Interestingly enough, they had some idea what happened, even without it...

The plane, because it was a newer model, sends information about problems that happen in flight, to assist with maintenance on the ground. From this information they determined that the plane lost its ability to determine its speed, and that the autopilot and autothrust systems turned off. This was in addition to the system that usually flies the aircraft, even when the "autopilot" is off. It sounds weird, but all these new planes are not actually directly flown anymore, they have a system that is designed to keep the pilot from fucking things up.

All they have are dinky little joysticks. It looks like a computer joystick that you'd buy for a home computer. I kid you not.

[msongs]

6. yep no more physically manhandling controls to fly - pilots are forgetting how to actually fly nt

[originalpckelly]

7. They showed how it works...

Even when you're "flying" it's really doing all the work for you. It's extremely scary, because they're not prepared for emergencies like this.

There is no simulator out there that can simulate the actual physical effects of a stall where you fall a thousand or more feet in a short period of time, which is what these extremely knowledgeable investigators believed happened.

However, this system that relayed information from the plane did provide the clues that I posted above.

I have to wonder why there shouldn't be some kind of recorder that works with satellites too, so you can know what's going on, even with these transatlantic flights where they go off of the radar. (That's perfectly normal too, basically, the pilots in the documentary said you're all alone out in the middle of the ocean. You cannot be see by land based radars because of the curvature of the earth.)

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

8. You are referring to "flight envelope protection"

Although a sufficiently stupid (or arrogant) pilot can still fuck things up even with flight envelope protection, since it is dependent on being accurately programmed.

[Blue_Tires]

17. I read on another forum that engineers

are finally working on redundant FDR/CVRs so that both units will record both functions (so in the event of an incident you only have to find one of them)

[SoapBox]

11. This incident has bothered me like others...

Now mind you...I'm no pilot. But I am a flight attendant...I've been flying for about 27 years.

The older I get, I seem to be getting more and more uncomfortable with any number of things regarding the aircraft.

Didn't Airbus and the airlines know that there was some kind of problem with the pitot tubes (but seems it started with the A320)...and, there was not an Airworthyness Directive ordering replacement.

I just don't trust the manufactures (SO many stupid design things), the carriers and in particular the FAA.

...other events (close your eyes if you don't want to be reminded) that really bother me: Pan Am in MSY, PSA, Pan Am / KLM Tenerife, Air Florida, Delta in DFW and Swiss Air (ugh...my crew was walking past this ship during boarding at JFK the evening the crash happened)...to name a few.

There is quite an article at Wikipedia...and it's up to date:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

...read about the pitot tubes under "Airspeed Inconsistency".

[high density]

12. I hope they can get some information from it

and that we can understand why this plane went down.

[mn9driver]

13. Amazing. I never would have believed they could find it.

It's like they found a coffee can half buried in the mud somewhere in pitch black Yellowstone National Park using a flashlight.

[Blue_Tires]

15. This is nothing short of an incredible technical achievement...

Never before has crash evidence been salvaged that deep after so much time passed...Congrats to all involved, and hopefully they can get some usable info...

[Blue_Tires]

19. And now the CVR has been found as well

http://www.bea.aero/fr/enquetes/vol.af.447/info03mai2011.en.php