CAIRO, 14 January 2004 — A French submarine robot began a test dive yesterday in a warm-up for a search of the flight recorders of an Egyptian plane that crashed into the Red Sea 10 days ago, killing all 148 people aboard, an official said.
The test by the Scorpio robot was to last up to four hours before the real search is launched later off Egypt’s resort at Sharm El-Sheikh, according to Alain Suard, president of France Telecom Marine, which owns the robot.
The aim of the test, which began at 9:30 a.m. (0730 GMT), is to “purge the robot’s hydraulic circuits of air bubbles,” Suard told AFP by telephone. The robot dropped to 300 meters (1,000 feet) below the surface for the test, though it can reach depths of 1,100 meters (3,600 feet), he added.
The Scorpio arrived in Sharm El-Sheikh on Monday and will be joined tomorrow by another underwater search vehicle, the Super Achille.
The two robots will boost the efforts of diving teams on location since soon after the crash which killed 134 French tourists and a Moroccan as well as 13 Egyptian crew minutes after the plane took off for Paris from Sharm El-Sheikh.
Their main target will be the black box flight recorders located last week by French experts working with Egyptian teams at a depth of up to 800 meters (2,600 feet) of water and impossible to retrieve with the resources then available. One black box records the movements of the plane’s controls and the other the voices of the pilot and co-pilot.
The information is expected to reveal the exact cause of the disaster, although Egyptian and French experts believe it was a technical fault or other accident and have ruled out terrorism.
Questions have arisen over the safety record of the charter company, Flash Airlines, after reports emerged that it had been banned from Swiss airspace in 2002 because of “serious shortcomings,” including maintenance problems with engines and flight controls.
Both the Egyptian government and Flash Airlines have rejected the Swiss allegations. The 3.4 ton Scorpio 2000, which is 2.8 meters long, 2.17 meters high and 1.5 meters wide, is operated remotely from the cable ship Ile de Batz,” co-owned by Alcatel and Louis Dreyfus Armateur.
The Ile de Batz, which lays and maintains underwater telecommunications cables, can hold its place in deep and stormy waters. The robot can retrieve from the seabed tiny objects as well as those weighing as much as 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) with its sophisticated mechanical claws, which can also cut through the steel body of the plane.
The Scorpio is also endowed with “big ears” or hydrophones which can guide it to frequencies like those emitted by the black boxes as well as several cameras which show operators on the surfaces what is happening below.
It also has a global positioning system, a video amplifier, a sonar and tape recorders. It can move at three knots (some five kilometers an hour) horizontally, 1.5 knots vertically and turn 40 degrees a second. A similar submarine robot that also belongs to France Telecom Marine was sent to the Irish Sea in July 1985 to recover the black boxes of an Air India Boeing that crashed after a bomb allegedly planted by extremist Sikhs exploded on board, killing 329.
The French Navy said it had contracted another robot that can dive to a depth of 1,000 meters. The US Navy in 1996 retrieved a black box from a depth of 2,195 meters.
