A NEW search for the black box from the Air France aircraft that crashed while crossing the Atlantic six months ago will begin in February.
The operation, which is due to take place some 1,000km off Brazil’s northeast coast, will take up to three months and involve sonar and robot submarines, the head of France’s air crash investigation agency, Jean-Paul Troadec, has said.
He was speaking in Rio de Janeiro after a meeting with relatives of some of the victims of flight AF447, which went missing while en route to Paris from Rio on June 1st. Some 228 passengers and crew, including three Irish women, died in the crash.
The cause of the worst disaster in Air France’s 75-year history remains unknown, though speculation has focused on the aircraft’s speed sensors after error messages suggested inconsistent data readings, but the BEA, France’s air crash agency, has said it is too early to tell whether the so-called “Pitot probes” were to blame. The BEA is due to publish an update on its investigation later this week.
The flight data and cockpit conversations recorded on the black box could be crucial to determining the cause, but despite three months of searches by a French navy submarine and sonar-equipped ships, the device has not been recovered.
In recent months, an international team of researchers has pored over information on currents and underwater topography to try to narrow the area for a new attempt.
Mr Troadec said he had tried to impress on the families that his agency was conducting its inquiry “with the full intention of getting at the truth”.
Those close to the investigation have been playing down the prospect of this week’s report shedding further light on the circumstances of the disaster, and Mr Troadec indicated that while it would set out “new details, notably in terms of safety recommendations”, it contained “no surprises”.
The first, preliminary report, released in September, concluded that the Pitot airspeed sensors on the Airbus “were one of the factors that led to the accident, but were not the only ones”.
Among the victims of the Air France disaster were Dr Jane Deasy (27) from Rathgar in Dublin, Dr Aisling Butler (26) of Roscrea, Co Tipperary, and Dr Eithne Walls (28) from Ballygowan, Co Down. The three were returning from a holiday in Brazil.
Last week, the BEA said it was studying the circumstances in which an Air France jet was forced to descend rapidly in storms over the Atlantic last month.
It hopes the incident could help explain why flight AF447 crashed near the same spot in June.