French submarine has all the right credentials to lead search operation
June 7, 2009
By Gregory Viscusi
The mini-submarine France is sending to search for the black boxes of the Air France Airbus, that crashed last week into the Atlantic Ocean, has scooped up silverware from the Titanic and plugged holes in a sunken oil tanker.
The 8m-long Nautile and its sister submarine, the Victor 6000, are on their way to the crash zone aboard the oceanographic research ship Pourquoi Pas? (Why Not?).
The Pourquoi Pas? will join about seven other ships and 11 airplanes to look for debris of the Airbus SAS A330-200 that went down on Monday on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board.
Brazilian planes have spotted debris about 650km north-east of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha islands, off the north-eastern coast.
"The current operations are intended to collect as much debris as possible before it is dispersed by winds and currents," Christophe Prazuck, a spokesman for the French military, said on Thursday.
"The Pourquoi Pas? will look for the black boxes, which can take weeks," said Prazuck.
Black boxes contain data from the flight, such as its speed and altitude, and any communication from the pilots. They emit signals for 30 days after an accident, according to French officials.
The water's depth in the area ranged from 1 000-3 000m, said Paul-Louis Arslanian, the director of the French Aviation Accidents Investigation Bureau, this week.
It's the sort of mission the Nautile was designed for.
The submarine has carried out 1 500 dives since 1984 and is capable of reaching 97 percent of ocean floors, according to Ifremer, the French oceanography research institute that owns it.
In January 2003 it plugged eight holes on the hull of the Prestige, a tanker that was leaking oil from 3 500m deep off the French and Spanish Atlantic coasts.
Between 1994 and 1996 it dived 96 times to the Titanic, helping to recover 5 000 artefacts from the passenger ship that sank in 1912 and now lies under 3 800m of water 600km south-west of Newfoundland.
"The Nautile is one of only a few manned submarines that can withstand the 6 000 pounds per square inch pressure at the Titanic wreck site," Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry announced in a 2003 exhibition about the Titanic recovery.
The submarine can carry a crew of three, dive to 6 000m and stay there for five hours, according to Ifremer. It is equipped with two arms, light projectors, sonar equipment and video cameras.
It was built by DCN, the former French state-run naval shipyard, in Toulon. The Victor 6000 can also dive to 6 000m. It is controlled from the mother ship and has eight cameras.
Pourquoi Pas? and its submarines have been diverted from the Azores where they were helping to map the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where three tectonic plates confront each other at depths of up to 7 800m.
Arslanian, the head of the French inquiry, said the black boxes might never be found. He said this might not matter.
"We have had cases where we never found the black boxes and we were able to reconstruct what happened, and there have been cases where we found them and they didn't tell us anything useful," he added. - Bloomberg
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