FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil/Paris: A French nuclear submarine launched a high-tech undersea sweep yesterday to track down the black boxes missing after an Air France flight plunged into the Atlantic.
The Emeraude, a nuclear hunter-killer sub, will use its sensitive sonar to probe the ocean depths off Brazil in a desperate race to find the flight data recorders before their locator beacons run out of power.
If the boxes are not recovered within three weeks they might never be found, complicating the investigation into the loss of Air France Flight 447 from Rio to Paris, which crashed on June 1 with the loss of 228 people. “The Emeraude has begun its search operations,” said Captain Christophe Prazuck.
The first search zone measures 20 nautical miles by 20, that is to say 36 kilometers by 36, which the sub should cover in a day, Prazuck said.
“It will change zone each day and no time limit has been set,” he said, adding that the Emeraude would be joined in the area by the Mistral, a naval command and control vessel equipped with a Panther helicopter.
Brazil already has a large naval and air force contingent in the crash zone, which has recovered some plane debris and at least 41 bodies, and the Pentagon has sent sonar gear to help in the search.
French officials acknowledge the operation will not be easy and success is far from guaranteed.
The black boxes are thought to be in waters as deep as 6,100 meters and 1,150 km from the Brazilian coast.
“We’ll need a major stroke of luck, since we don’t know exactly where the flight went down, but it’s worth a try,” a military official said last week.
If the Emeraude does locate the signal, the French scientific research vessel Pourquoi Pas will launch a mini-submarine — one which was used to survey the wreck of the Titanic — to retrieve the recorders. “The Emeraude will operate a bit like an airship hovering over a mountain chain and searching with binoculars,” Captain Jerome Erulin, spokesman for the French navy, told AFP in Paris.
In this case the role of the “binoculars” will be played by the Emeraude’s passive sonar, sensitive underwater microphones designed to hear enemy nuclear missile subs patrolling almost silently through deep waters.
