News Articles with Category: Air France 447 Search

Submarines: Very Special Robots

October 11, 2014 – via The Strategy Page Bluefin 21s can be quickly flown to any part of the world and put to work from just about any ship with a crane (to out Bluefin into the water and take it out again for battery recharging, data transfer and any needed maintenance). A Bluefin can map about 90 square kilometers of seabed a day and the search area could ultimately grow to include over 600,000 square kilometers but for the moment the search is concentrated on 600 square kilometers of ocean bottom.

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AUVSI: Hydroid aces big underwater finds in 2011

August 16, 2011 – via AUVSI Flight Daily News Finding objects on the sea floor is the technological equivalent of the proverbial needle in the haystack. Hard to navigate and image, Hydroid overcame the typical dilemmas of the deep, turning up two big discoveries so far this year.

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Cape Cod and the search for Air France 447

July 26, 2011 – via Cape Cod Times The French aviation accident investigation agency partnered with experts from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Even though WHOI came up short on a previous attempt, the French felt confident they were the right team for the job. “We made some great maps and proved to ourselves we could work in that terrain,” said Dr. David Gallo, special projects coordinator at WHOI. With an average depth of two miles and terrain more rugged than the Rocky Mountains, the Alps or the Grand Canyon, it was a difficult search, Gallo said.

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Air France 447: How scientists found a needle in a haystack

May 6, 2011 – via Boing Boing They’d barely been at the search location for a week when they found what they were looking for. On April 3, researchers spotted the plane’s debris field, 13,000 feet down, smack in the middle of a massive underwater mountain range.

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What Happened to Air France Flight 447?

May 4, 2011 – via New York Times Until the last few decades, the tools to explore these underwater mountains did not exist. Early submarines could go deep enough, but the terrain was impossibly forbidding. Even today, the machinery for a journey to the midocean ridge is prohibitively expensive for most teams. In the oceanography world, it is common to spend more than $1 million on an expedition, but a trip to the mountains at Tasil Point can easily cost 10 times as much and require submarines so advanced that only a handful of scientists know how to use them.

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Voice Recorder of 2009 Air France Flight Found

May 3, 2011 – via Wall Street Journal French air-crash investigators said they found and retrieved the cockpit voice recorder from an Air France jetliner that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean almost two years ago, less than two days after searchers found the plane’s flight data recorder.

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Doomed jet found by Mass. robots yields key evidence

May 2, 2011 – via Boston Globe French investigators said yesterday that they have retrieved a key component of one of the flight-data recorders from an Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean nearly two years ago, which was located last month by robots developed on Cape Cod.

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Investigators Find Air France Jet’s Black Box

May 1, 2011 – via Wall Street Journal Investigators combing the wreckage of an Air France jetliner that crashed almost two years ago said Sunday they had located and retrieved the plane’s data recorder from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

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PICTURES: Crashed AF447 flight-data recorder found and retrieved

May 1, 2011 – via Air Transport Intelligence news The crucial cylindrical memory unit, which had been missing when the chassis of the recorder was originally located, was found during a dive operation by a remote underwater vehicle on 1 May.

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Update: Robots find key missing piece of Air France crash black box

May 1, 2011 – via Network World The crash of Air France Flight 447 remains a mystery, but clues are being found

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Air France crash ‘flight recorder’ found

April 28, 2011 – via CNN The find – which comes more than three weeks after search teams found the tail section of the aircraft — does not include the “memory unit” which holds the recorded data that could eventually help investigators determine the cause of the crash.

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Air France Black Box Search Harnesses Hollywood for Crash Clues

April 20, 2011 – via Bloomberg News The wreckage of the Airbus SAS A330 jet was discovered this month 3,900 meters (12,800 feet) deep in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil after multiple searches. Few aircraft salvage missions have probed the same depth, where the sea is perfectly black, temperatures approach freezing and water pressure is equal to the weight of a car on a postage stamp.

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S Atlantic Air France wreckage recovery preparations under way

April 12, 2011 – via The French air accident investigation agency, the Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses (BEA), has announced that a ship from Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN) will be used to recover the wreckage of Air France Airbus A330-200, F-GZCP, which crashed into the South Atlantic in the early morning of June 1, 2009.

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Alcatel ship to retrieve Air France crash wreckage

April 9, 2011 – via Business Week The agency said in a statement Friday the ship Ile de Sein belonging to French company Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks has been selected to carry out the work, using a robotic underwater vehicle.

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Woods Hole scientists use robots to find jet wreckage

April 5, 2011 – via Cape Cod Times Onboard the ship we had the most sophisticated deep-sea search capabilities on the planet. The search area was a swath of ocean approximately 3,900 square miles, which made the plane a needle in a very large, very wet haystack.

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Debris Is Found From ’09 Crash of Air France Jet

April 4, 2011 – via New York Times The search boat, operated by about a dozen specialists from the’ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, was not equipped with appropriate equipment to recover the wreckage.

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Investigators release underwater images of wreckage

April 4, 2011 – via UK Daily Mail Bodies of victims of Air France flight 447 finally found in the wreckage at bottom of the Atlantic after two-year mystery

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Investigators to Show Photos of Found Air France Jet

April 4, 2011 – via Wall Street Journal Oceanographers conducting an undersea search on Sunday located pieces of the Airbus A330 jetliner, which crashed on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people onboard. The current search, which began ten days ago, is the fourth attempt to find the plane’s wreckage.

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France Starts Fourth AF447 Search Campaign

March 25, 2011 – via AINonline This time a Remus 600 autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) will start by exploring the seabed in a 20-nm circle around the LKP. If needed, it will extend the radius to 40 nm.

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WHOI Conducts Latest Search for Air France Flight 447

March 25, 2011 – via WHOI Three REMUS 6000 vehicles will be utilized in the search for the wreckage of Air France Flight 447. The vehicles will use side scan sonar to map the ocean floor in long overlapping lanes, using a survey process known as “mowing the lawn.”

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Robot Submarines Seek a Downed Plane’s Secrets

February 25, 2011 – via New Scientist A trio of deep-sea robots are the best hope yet for finding what caused one of aviation’s most mysterious disasters.

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Seattle-Based Ship Sets Out To Find Air France Flight 447

February 8, 2011 – via KIRO 7 Eyewitness News Air France and Airbus have teamed up McCallum and Deep Ocean with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

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France to launch new search for wreckage of Air France 447

February 4, 2011 – via Associated Press Three advanced underwater robots will begin scouring the mountainous ocean depths between Brazil and western Africa in mid-March, looking for wreckage of the Airbus A330 that went down June 1, 2009 after running into an intense high altitude thunderstorm.

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