PARIS – A French submarine with advanced sonar equipment has begun searching for the flight recorders of the Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean last week.
The nuclear-powered submarine Emeraude was sent to the area to search for the “black box” recorders, which may help explain the disaster and which are believed to lie on the ocean floor.
Investigators face a long search for clues to what went wrong when the Airbus A330 jet disappeared, according to French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck. All 228 people on board died in the crash.
“Up to now, the time frame for the search for victims and debris has been of the order of days or a week . . . [now] it’s going to be of the order of weeks or months,” he told LCI television in France yesterday.
The Air France flight is believed to have run into trouble when it hit a violent storm midway over the Atlantic Ocean, and potential problems with speed sensors have become one of the focal points of the inquiry.
Other causes have not been ruled out. The website of the French weekly L’Express said yesterday that two potentially suspect names had been identified on the passenger list by French intelligence services.
It said the names “correspond to people known for their links to Islamist terrorism”, but a French military spokesman said he could not confirm the report.
Authorities have seen no credible claims of responsibility and have said the crash was unlikely to have been caused by an attack but they have not excluded it entirely.
In the search zone, where scattered pieces of debris, including a large section from the aircraft tail, have been recovered, vessels are trying to comb a rugged area of the ocean floor, thousands of metres below the surface.
Mr Prazuck said searchers had taken two weeks to locate the black box recorders after the crash of a Boeing 737 at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in 2004, despite much easier conditions.
“That aircraft crashed very close to the coast. There was no doubt about where the accident happened and it took 15 days to recover the black box,” he said. “Here the accident happened 1,000km [620 miles] from the coast. The situation is very complex.”
Mr Prazuck said the Emeraude was searching an area of 36sq km and the target search zone would be changed on a daily basis.
If the recorders are found, miniature submarines from the Pourquoi Pas, a French exploration and survey ship also deployed to the area, could be used to recover them.
Brazilian military search teams have recovered 41 bodies and moved some of them to the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha off Brazil’s northeastern coast, which is being used as a base for the search operations.
The aircraft sent 24 automated messages in its final minutes on June 1st, detailing a rapid series of systems failures.
The speed sensors that gauge how fast an aircraft is flying have become the focus of the investigation after some of the messages showed that they provided inconsistent data to the pilots. – (Reuters)