Searching for black boxes from Air France Brazil crash

GlobalPost
The World

The search for human remains and black box data recorders from the Air France Flight 447 that crashed off the coast of Brazil two years ago continues with the aid of cutting edge undersea technology, Bloomberg reports.

In a detailed story today, Bloomberg describes how exploration of the plane wreckage—which is situated deeper than the remains of the Titanic—is being done with technology pioneered by deep-sea oil drilling, advanced telecommunications and even Hollywood movies.

The remains of the Airbus SAS A330 jet were found under 12,800 feet of water, a depth where there’s no light, near-freezing temperatures and the “water pressure is equal to the weight of a car on a postage stamp,” Bloomberg reported.

A robot tethered to a surface ship will explore what's left of the plane and attempt to locate data recorders as well as human remains. When the plane crashed over the Atlantic Ocean en route from Paris to Rio de Janeiro on June 1, 2009, all 228 passengers were killed.

in a joint effort between a French telecom firm that owns the ship and an underwater engineering company. Bloomberg reports that the company’s deep-sea exploration robots were developed after interest and funding such technology surged with the popularity of James Cameron’s 1997 film, “Titanic.”

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