Brazilian divers found a large tail section from a crashed Air France jet today, one of the largest pieces yet recovered from wreckage that is helping to narrow the search for the black boxes from Flight 447.
A US Navy team is bringing in high-tech underwater listening devices to detect pings from the data and voice recorders.
Brazilian and French military ships that have recovered 24 bodies and large amounts of plane wreckage searched amid a sea of floating debris, finding the tail section with Air France’s trademark red and blue stripes.
What caused the Airbus A330 to crash last week with 228 people on board will remain a mystery unless searchers can locate the plane’s black box flight data and voice recorders, which are likely to be buried deep in the ocean.
Two US Navy devices that can detect emergency beacons to a depth of 20,000ft (6,100m)are being flown to Brazil with a Navy team, according to the Pentagon. They will be delivered to ships that will then listen for transmissions from the black boxes, which are programmed to emit signals for at least 30 days.
Advertisement
Sixteen bodies were recovered over the weekend about 45 miles (70km) from where the jet sent out messages signalling electrical failures and loss of cabin pressure.
Authorities also announced that searchers spotted two airplane seats and debris bearing the Air France logo, and recovered dozens of structural components from the plane.
They had already recovered jet wing fragments, and said that hundreds of personal items believed to have belonged to passengers were plucked from the water.
The Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that his nation’s military would do all it could to retrieve bodies and return them to relatives.
“We know how significant it is for a family to recover their loved one,” Mr da Silva said today on his weekly radio show. He added: “During this painful time it’s not going to resolve the problem, but it is an immense comfort to know they can bury their loved ones.”
Advertisement
France is leading the investigation into the cause of the crash, while Brazilian officials are focusing on the recovery of victims and wreckage from Flight 447, which is thought to have broken up in turbulent weather on the night of May 31 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
A French military spokesman, Christophe Prazuck, said that the nuclear attack submarine Emeraude would arrive at the scene later this week and “will try to find the acoustic pings emitted by the black box”.
The Ventose, a French military frigate, arrived yesterday and is now under Brazilian command, Mr Prazuck said. That ship has found and brought aboard seven of the victims’ bodies discovered so far, and about 30 pieces of debris that “most probably come from the plane”, he added.
A French Navy ship, Mistral, was headed to the site, he said, and the oceanographic survey ship Pourquoi Pas, equipped with deep-water unmanned subs, was also en route to help to locate the black box.
The search is focusing on an area of several hundred square miles about 400 miles northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast.
Advertisement
Brazilian authorities have refused to release the precise coordinates of where they are looking, except to say the area lies southeast of the last jet transmission and could have indicated the pilot was trying to turn around in mid-flight and head back to the islands.
The investigation is increasingly focused on whether external instruments on the Airbus A330 may have iced over, confusing speed sensors and leading computers to set the plane’s speed too fast or slow — a potentially deadly mistake.
The French agency investigating the disaster said that airspeed instruments on the plane had not been replaced as the maker had recommended, but cautioned that it was too early to draw conclusions about what role that may have played in the crash.
The agency, BEA, said that the plane received inconsistent airspeed readings from different instruments as it struggled in a massive thunderstorm.