Air France Black Box Search Passes 30 Days

Sources Tell CBS News That Black Boxes from Deadly Crash Can Still Emit Signals Beyond 30-Day Mark

(CBS/AP)  French investigators say the search for the black boxes of Flight 447 is continuing although they are no longer certain to emit signals.

The flight's voice and data recorders are guaranteed to emit signals for 30 days after an accident. Tuesday marks 30 days since Air France Airbus A330 plunged into the Atlantic. All 228 people aboard were killed.

However, sources at Honeywell (which manufactures the black boxes for A330s) and Dukane Corp. (which manufactures the underwater locator beacons or "pingers" in the boxes) who are familiar with aspects of the investigation concerning the search for the black boxes tell CBS News that the specific type of boxes that were on Flight 447 will continue to emit a signal after the 30-day mark.

They add that the signal will be consistent and at full-strength (approximately 160 decibels) until the end of the battery life when the signal "will drop off fairly rapidly ... and then it just stops.”

They tell CBS News that will occur "in a few days... maybe as much as a week" from now. After that, no signal will be emitted.

"It does not continue operating with decreasing signal strength," the source said.

Martine del Bono, spokeswoman for the French air accident investigation agency, says it "is continuing the search" as long as there is a "reasonable" chance of locating the black boxes.

She gave no final deadline Tuesday for ending the search.

The black boxes could be key to determining what happened to the plane.

Brazil has ended the search for more bodies.

[sylevine1]

For the last ten years there hasn?t been a technical reason why the digital flight recorder data isn't sent in real-time to the ground (see the BBC/Equinox video ?The BOX?, 2000, on the flight recorders). Then with-in a couple of seconds you have the planes position/location, its attitude, velocity, etc. safely stored on the ground and used for flight safety, aviation security and cost reduction. This data used in real-time could have also prevented 9/11 (see http://www.safelander.com.

On June 4, 2009 the Los Angeles Times put the following into in their LETTERS section:

?There is no technical reason why digital flight recorder data are not sent in real-time to the ground. We have the technology to do this. Then, within a couple of seconds, we would have a plane?s position, altitude and velocity safely stored on the ground. This information could be used for flight safety, aviation security and cost reduction. We don?t know what went wrong on Flight 447, but we would sure know where the plane went down, why it went down and possibly could have saved lives.? Getting to the crash site early may save lives, getting the DFDR can prevent recurring fatal crashes. It?s not just position that?s needed it?s all of the data sent to the recorder that is critical to ascertaining the root cause of a crash and should be available to prevent some of the crashes from occurring.


A year prior to 9/11 I spoke in NY at the International Aviation Safety Association meeting on preventing crashes like golfer Payne Stewart?s decompression crash. Nothing was done by the FAA or industry and we got 9/11 (hijacking is about ten percent of aviation fatalities) and the 2005, 100 fatality, Helios decompression crash. When a plane deviates from its approved flight plan we now have the ability to securely take remote control of it and land it safely at a designated airfield. We presently have remote pilot vehicles flying now utilizing secure high bandwidth communication networks (we use them for our submarines, AWACS planes, etc.) and there isn't a logical reason for not making that technology available for cargo and carrier aircraft. The cost of 9/11 alone is ten times the cost of putting in a safe system and yet nothing has intentionally been done.

Billions of dollars are wasted each year on unnecessary airport runway expansion programs to reduce fatal ground incursions. These incursions wouldn?t occur if the flight data was shared so pilots and air traffic control had better visibility. But because the digital data isn?t shared automatically the pilot sees only a fraction of the information necessary to prevent a crash and the same hold for the air traffic controllers. Crashes such as Tenerife, Comair, etc. are directly caused by the lack of visibility due to not sharing the DFDR data in real-time. The real-time use of the DFDR data to prevent crashes is more important then its present autopsy mode of operation.

Telemetering the flight data to the ground in real-time would assure that we have the data. In many crashes the flight data isn't recovered (e.g. 9/11, et al) or has errors in it since no one is looking at it, or using it in real-time to find malfunctions. Yet, this valuable digital flight recorder data (DFDR) data has been left to the autopsy mode for post mortem simulations and not utilized proactively in real-time to save lives.

This, Air France flight 447, is another example of horrific crashes that possibly could have been prevented and saved lives. We surely would be able to use the flight data to prevent recurring crashes of this type and to minimize the anguish of the passengers families and the cost and time of trying to recover the recorders. The aviation industry has fought against flight recorders out of fear of liability. Now they are fighting to keep the information going to the flight recorders industry private even if that jeopardized national security and been responsible for countless aviation fatalities. The industry put the egregious Titanic (Warsaw) clause that limits a family member of a passenger that is killed in a crash to a small fraction of the persons earning capacity even if the industry is found at fault. This has been printed in very fine print on the back of every ticket. They were not successful in getting this egregious law over land since people were watching and protested. The only way to change this and to make passenger safety and national security come first is if the public demands that the flight recorder data be freely available in real-time to prevent crashes from intitially occurring as well as to prevent reoccuring crashes.

Sy Levine

[e-mail]
[e-mail]

http://www.safelander.com

Remote Aircraft Flight Recorder and Advisory System (RAFT) patent #5,890,079, 3/30/1999

[speakinup22]

It would be sad indeed, if these instruments aren't found. Lives are potentialy at stake.

[whitemale08]

Curious, what are they hiding?