A TEAM of self-propelling robots is to comb 800 square miles of the Atlantic ocean floor this month. It will be the third attempt to locate the wreckage of the only aircraft in the past 30 years of commercial aviation whose black box flight recorders have not been recovered after a crash at sea.
After delays caused by bad weather and technical problems, French investigators are spending $14m (£9.2m) on the search for the wreckage of Air France flight 447, an Airbus A330 that disappeared last June in thunderstorms 600 miles off Brazil.
The crash has been blamed on a build-up of ice on speed sensors known as pitot tubes, but officials say no firm conclusions can be drawn without cockpit data from the aircraft’s last moments.
Jean-Paul Troadec, France’s chief accident investigator, said his team had been able to narrow the search area using computer models of currents in the days after the crash, which killed all 228 people on board. “We’ve reduced the size of the haystack,” he said. “Now we have to find the needle.”
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