AUVs locate lost Air France flight
An AUV photo of the landing gear of the lost Air France flight on the ocean floor.
After two years, one of the strangest and most worrying puzzles of recent times, the loss of Air France Flight 447, may be about to be solved with the finding of the wreckage some two and a half miles down.
Apart from the bodies that will be recovered, there is hope that the plane’s ‘black box’ is to be found amongst the wreckage of the lost plane which has been finally found by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil’s north eastern coast.
The flight disappeared on June 1, 2009, carrying 216 passengers and 12 crew members.
Many theories have been put forward, but the most likely is that the flight encountered heavy turbulence and possibly a steep downdraft caused by a ‘high altitude storm’ between Rio de Janeiro and Paris. However, the disappearance left no real evidence of what had happened.
This fourth search attempt is being led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) under the direction of the BEA, France’s Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses. The team started searching the site on 25 March using REMUS 6000 AUVs and, after a week, one of the mission’s three AUVs detected debris on the seafloor.
A second vehicle was dispatched to the area for more detailed sonar mapping and photographic imaging. The images it brought back were relayed to BEA, the French air safety investigation authority, which identified the wreckage as the Airbus A 330. All three REMUS vehicles are currently mapping the area to get a comprehensive view of the accident site.
Images included photos of the fuselage, engine and landing gear and a sonar image of the crash area. Investigators plan to examine the wreckage in detail and to continue to search for the plane’s flight recorders
The search was targeted in an area of about 3,900 sq/m several hundred miles off north eastern Brazil.
The REMUS 6000s are designed and operated by WHOI. Two of the vehicles are owned by the Waitt Institute for Discovery; the third is owned and operated by Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR of Germany. They are designed to operate in depths up to 3.73 miles or 6,000 metres.
The REMUS-6000 model was created to reach great depths and allow for long duration missions. Loaded with an 11 kWh rechargeable Li-ion battery pack, the AUV can swim in its standard configuration for up to 22 hours at speeds up to 4 knots (2.06 m/s). The standard configuration consists of an ADCP, CTD, sidescan sonar and a high resolution digital still camera.
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