Searchers combing the Atlantic Ocean between South America and Africa heard a previously undetected phantom ping from a sonar tape that recorded searches made immediately after the Air France A330 disappeared in a thunderstorm over the Atlantic.
This development has encouraged Air France in its search for the data recorder, or black box, from the aircraft. If the data recorder is retrieved, it should provide information about what went wrong as the airlines passed through a series of strong thunderstorms on a flight from Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
The discovery of a possible ‘ping’ from at least one of the recorders on board the Airbus A330 has allowed experts to narrow the search to a few square kilometres from several thousand ahead of the anniversary of the airline’s worst crash.
“Does this mean we have found the black boxes? We are still far from certain,” Baptiste said. “The search zone still equates to an area the size of Paris and we have to find an object the size of a shoebox in seabed terrain which looks like the Andes,” he told a news conference.
The recording which could contain the signal emitted from the recorder devices, buried until now behind background noise, was made on July 1, exactly one month after the crash.
The distance from land and the depth of the ocean in the area of the crash has made recovery of the black box impossible to date. This crash raised many questions about these black boxes or data recorders, such as whether they should have flotation devices attached to them to make retrieval easier or whether stronger batteries should be requires.
Though fixes seem very affordable, to date nothing has changed with the data recorder system.
Should we wait for the next deep-water accident to install flotation devices or stronger batteries? I’m sure the airline industry and regulatory administrators have a logical explanation for their delay.
(Photo credit: HO/AFP/Getty Images)
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
