Data Recovered From Air France Flight Recorders

Investigators at the French Bureau of Investigations and Analyses spent a full day painstakingly removing, drying and testing the circuits of the flash memory chips inside the flight recorders, which arrived Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in Le Bourget, near Paris. The data and the voice recordings were then successfully downloaded over the weekend and transferred onto a secure computer server. Copies were made and provided to the French judicial police, who are conducting a separate criminal inquiry into the crash.

The plane’s flight data recorder tracks roughly 1,300 different statistics, including the plane’s position, speed, altitude and direction when it began to experience difficulties. Investigators plan to synchronize the data with the voice recorder, which includes the final two hours of the pilots’ conversations and other cockpit sounds, including any alarms that would have sounded as its flight systems failed.

In a statement, investigators said they would spend the next several weeks conducting a detailed analysis of the black box recordings in order to assemble a fuller narrative of what happened in the flight’s final moments. An interim report on their findings was expected to be published during the summer, the agency said.

All 228 passengers and crew members were killed when Flight 447 went down on June 1, 2009, in a heavy high-altitude thunderstorm en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.

Decrypting the data on the recorders of the plane, an Airbus A330-200, gained new urgency after the decision in March by a French judge to place both Airbus and Air France under formal investigation on accusations of involuntary manslaughter in the case. Under French law, being placed under formal investigation is one step short of criminal charges but could lead to a trial.

So far, the main source of information about what happened has been messages sent automatically from the plane, which indicated a malfunction of its airspeed sensors.

At a briefing last week, Jean-Paul Troadec, the head of the investigations bureau, said a salvage boat had successfully raised dozens of pieces of the plane, including its engines, most of the cockpit and several onboard computers.

“We have all of the pieces that we wanted,” Mr. Troadec said.

Still missing so far from the trove of debris, however, are the three airspeed sensors — known as Pitot tubes — that are believed to have failed. But Mr. Troadec said he did not believe physical inspection of the sensors would yield critical new information.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a French government minister who oversees transportation issues, expressed her “great satisfaction” Monday that investigators would be able to read and analyze the black box recordings. “This proves we were right to devote such an effort to shed light on this accident.”

Air France, Airbus and the French government spent more than $30 million in four attempts to locate and retrieve the wreckage of Flight 447.

In an effort to demonstrate the transparency of the investigation, investigators said Monday that the extraction of the data from the recorders was filmed and recorded in its entirety and conducted in the presence of investigators from four other countries — Germany, the United States, Britain and Brazil.

The French police were expected to determine later this week whether traces of DNA could be recovered from the bodies of two crash victims found this month in the wreckage two and a half miles below the surface.

Underwater cameras have located the remains of about 50 people amid the debris. Jean Quintard, a deputy prosecutor, said last week that it was unlikely that all of those bodies could be raised. Based on the condition and position of each body, police specialists would be forced to determine the possibility of recovering each corpse on a case-by-case basis, he said.

It remains unclear whether a definitive identification of all the recovered remains will be possible. Forensics experts said that, after being immersed in salt water for two years, most traces of DNA would have been leached away. The best hope for identification would come from the marrow of larger bones from a victim’s leg or pelvis.

“What remains of any DNA would be in the center of the bone,” said Fran?ois Daoust, head of the forensic institute of the French national police agency. “But this is the first time sampling has been attempted under such conditions.”

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What Happened to Air France Flight 447?

  The Alucia and a Remus 6000, an unmanned reconnaissance submarine, at the last-known position of Flight 447. The sub can navigate rugged terrain miles beneath the ocean's surface and bring back thousands of photographs of underwater wrecks.

Late on the morning of April 3, the expedition ship Alucia rocked violently on the South Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a squall. On the aft deck, the crew huddled together in rain slickers and gazed across the heaving seas to a yellow blur on the horizon. This was an unmanned reconnaissance submarine carrying 15,000 photographs that they were nearly desperate to see. But it had buoyed to the surface just as the squall sprang up, and with 30-knot winds and four-foot swells that splashed over the stern, it was too dangerous to retrieve the sub. So they watched and waited.

A sonar image of the wreckage area of Air France Flight 447 that was released by French air-crash investigators on April 4.

For eight days, the Alucia had been trolling the ocean near a spot known as the L.K.P., or the Last Known Position of Flight 447, the Air France jet that vanished in June 2009, about halfway between South America and Africa. In the nearly two years since, three other search teams went looking for the wreckage, but this was the Alucia’s first try. The ship carried three Remus 6000 submarines, some of the most advanced underwater search vehicles on earth, which swept the seafloor in 20-hour runs, then surfaced to deliver sonar imagery to the Alucia’s scientific team, who pored over the data in 12-hour shifts around the clock. So far, they had not found the plane, but the day before, one scientist pointed at something unusual on the monitor and said, “What about this?” And ever since, the air on the Alucia was charged.

Everyone knew the stakes. This wasn’t a scan of the Sargasso Sea or a study of salinity samples. The families of 228 passengers were restless for results. The search had already taken two years and cost more than $25 million. Another $12 million was committed to the Alucia this year, but French investigators had quietly decided that this year would be the last. If the Alucia did not find the plane, no one ever would.

As expedition leader, Michael Purcell was equal parts colleague and boss, with a raspy voice and a sonic laugh and a playful sarcasm, but he knew the Remus subs as well as anyone. Looking at the fuzzy mark on the monitor, he knew they had found something unnatural. It was too long and straight to be geologic. It was unlike anything else on the seafloor. On the other hand, if it wasn’t Flight 447, Purcell knew the disappointment would be palpable. As he prepared the photographic sub to return to the bottom for an 18-hour mission, Purcell whispered to another scientist, “I’m 95 percent sure that’s it, but man, if it’s not, it’s going to be a long two and a half months.” The sub went down at 9:45 p.m. At 2 a.m., Purcell was still awake in his cabin. He picked up his journal. “Tired but not sleepy,” he wrote. “May have found the plane today. Everyone is on edge.”

Four hours later, Purcell was up with the sun, and by late morning he was on deck with the crew, watching the Remus bob in the distance. A little after 1 p.m., they pulled the sub onboard and attached two thick cables to upload its data into the computers in the mission-control room. They drew the curtains around the room, so nonscientific crew members could not see in, and yanked the satellite uplink offline, so no one could leak the news. Then they crowded around the computer monitor as the first images of Flight 447 came onscreen: engines, landing gear and sections of fuselage, all unmistakably vivid on the ocean floor. But as they turned the satellite back on and began sending the first photos to air-crash investigators in France, the deeper implications of their discovery were just beginning to surface.

The vanishing of Flight 447 was easy to bend into myth. No other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely — without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar. The airplane itself, an Airbus A330, was considered to be among the safest. It was equipped with the automated fly-by-wire system, which is designed to reduce human error by letting computers control many aspects of the flight. And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky. Or maybe Flight 447 was the Titanic, an uncrashable ship at the bottom of the sea.

Wil S. Hylton (wilshylton@gmail.com) is a contributing writer for the magazine. Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

The cover article this weekend, on Page 38, about the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, makes several references to unrecovered data cylinders from the plane’s black boxes. On May 1, after the article went to press, the cylinders were found on the floor of the South Atlantic Ocean and are expected to be analyzed in the coming week.

View the original article here

What Happened to Air France Flight 447?

  The Alucia and a Remus 6000, an unmanned reconnaissance submarine, at the last-known position of Flight 447. The sub can navigate rugged terrain miles beneath the ocean's surface and bring back thousands of photographs of underwater wrecks.

Late on the morning of April 3, the expedition ship Alucia rocked violently on the South Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a squall. On the aft deck, the crew huddled together in rain slickers and gazed across the heaving seas to a yellow blur on the horizon. This was an unmanned reconnaissance submarine carrying 15,000 photographs that they were nearly desperate to see. But it had buoyed to the surface just as the squall sprang up, and with 30-knot winds and four-foot swells that splashed over the stern, it was too dangerous to retrieve the sub. So they watched and waited.

A sonar image of the wreckage area of Air France Flight 447 that was released by French air-crash investigators on April 4.

For eight days, the Alucia had been trolling the ocean near a spot known as the L.K.P., or the Last Known Position of Flight 447, the Air France jet that vanished in June 2009, about halfway between South America and Africa. In the nearly two years since, three other search teams went looking for the wreckage, but this was the Alucia’s first try. The ship carried three Remus 6000 submarines, some of the most advanced underwater search vehicles on earth, which swept the seafloor in 20-hour runs, then surfaced to deliver sonar imagery to the Alucia’s scientific team, who pored over the data in 12-hour shifts around the clock. So far, they had not found the plane, but the day before, one scientist pointed at something unusual on the monitor and said, “What about this?” And ever since, the air on the Alucia was charged.

Everyone knew the stakes. This wasn’t a scan of the Sargasso Sea or a study of salinity samples. The families of 228 passengers were restless for results. The search had already taken two years and cost more than $25 million. Another $12 million was committed to the Alucia this year, but French investigators had quietly decided that this year would be the last. If the Alucia did not find the plane, no one ever would.

As expedition leader, Michael Purcell was equal parts colleague and boss, with a raspy voice and a sonic laugh and a playful sarcasm, but he knew the Remus subs as well as anyone. Looking at the fuzzy mark on the monitor, he knew they had found something unnatural. It was too long and straight to be geologic. It was unlike anything else on the seafloor. On the other hand, if it wasn’t Flight 447, Purcell knew the disappointment would be palpable. As he prepared the photographic sub to return to the bottom for an 18-hour mission, Purcell whispered to another scientist, “I’m 95 percent sure that’s it, but man, if it’s not, it’s going to be a long two and a half months.” The sub went down at 9:45 p.m. At 2 a.m., Purcell was still awake in his cabin. He picked up his journal. “Tired but not sleepy,” he wrote. “May have found the plane today. Everyone is on edge.”

Four hours later, Purcell was up with the sun, and by late morning he was on deck with the crew, watching the Remus bob in the distance. A little after 1 p.m., they pulled the sub onboard and attached two thick cables to upload its data into the computers in the mission-control room. They drew the curtains around the room, so nonscientific crew members could not see in, and yanked the satellite uplink offline, so no one could leak the news. Then they crowded around the computer monitor as the first images of Flight 447 came onscreen: engines, landing gear and sections of fuselage, all unmistakably vivid on the ocean floor. But as they turned the satellite back on and began sending the first photos to air-crash investigators in France, the deeper implications of their discovery were just beginning to surface.

The vanishing of Flight 447 was easy to bend into myth. No other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely — without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar. The airplane itself, an Airbus A330, was considered to be among the safest. It was equipped with the automated fly-by-wire system, which is designed to reduce human error by letting computers control many aspects of the flight. And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky. Or maybe Flight 447 was the Titanic, an uncrashable ship at the bottom of the sea.

Wil S. Hylton (wilshylton@gmail.com) is a contributing writer for the magazine. Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2011

The cover article this weekend, on Page 38, about the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, makes several references to unrecovered data cylinders from the plane’s black boxes. On May 1, after the article went to press, the cylinders were found on the floor of the South Atlantic Ocean and are expected to be analyzed in the coming week.

View the original article here