AF 447 Flight Recorder Found In the Atlantic 218
romiz writes "The memory of the flight recorder for the Air France 447 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed on June 1st 2009, has been found on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, and brought back to the surface in good shape. This is the data recorder, which saves the flight parameters. The search is still continuing in hope of finding the voice recorder containing the sounds recorded in the plane's cockpit."
DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK! (Score:4, Informative)
Do not click on above link, it's a shock video.
No mod points or I'd mod it down.
Re:I don't get this (Score:5, Informative)
Does somebody know why it's so hard for them to find it? I would assume that it's properly secured against crashes, and has a GPS/transmitter on board? What causes this to be so hard?
Inside the data recorder it's attached to a pinger which sends out a sound pulse on a regular basis for about a month after a crash; that makes it easy to find if the recorder stays intact and it's in relatively shallow water, but in this case it's so far down that the pinger was barely audible during the first search (it wasn't detected during the search and only found by post-search processing of the recorded audio data) and the various layers in the ocean reflect sound so it's hard to track. Obviously the batteries died long ago so the only way to find it now was to look for an orange cylinder on the seabed.
Re:Why not replicate the recorders to each other ? (Score:4, Informative)
Development cycles in Aviation are very long. Technology used is generally very old but well proven. Both recorders are probably jam packed with data with no room to spare and no free space to double up. The newer systems being designed will transmit the data which would now be recorded so it won't have to be scraped off the bottom of the Atlantic.
Re:I don't get this (Score:4, Informative)
If you're close enough to see a flashing LED you're close enough to see the wreckage. The ping is audible (with the right equipment) through thousands of feet of muddy water. Sound travels farther than light in the ocean.