Missing flight in 2009 thought to be unique ... but not any longer
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FOR nearly five years, government and industry officials have been exploring ways to make it easier to find airliners and their critical “black boxes” that end up in the ocean. But their efforts are too late to help in the case of the Malaysia Airlines jet.
The efforts were spurred primarily by the search for Air France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009. It was nearly two years later that the main wreckage of the Airbus A330 and its black boxes — its data and cockpit voice recorders — were found about 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.
Since then, industry officials and technical organizations have discussed requiring underwater locator beacons on black boxes to last at least 90 days instead of the current 30, making the boxes so that they will float, attaching underwater locator transmitters to the aircraft fuselage and putting floatable emergency locator transmitters on planes.
But those efforts are still a work in progress.
“I think at the time a lot of people were looking at Air France 447 as unique,” said William Waldock, an accident investigation teacher at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in the US. “We really had not had one like that where it takes so long to find it.”
But the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing on March 8 is proving remarkably difficult to find.
Data recorders typically record over a 24-hour period hundreds of types of information on how a plane is functioning. Investigators count on that information for clues to the cause of an accident, including how the engines are working, the pilots’ actions, the status of key systems, and the position of wing flaps and rudder.
Cockpit voice recorders contain pilots’ conversations and any sounds inside the cockpit in a continuous two-hour loop. Both are required to be equipped with an underwater locator beacon powered by a tiny radioactive pellet that sends out sonic signals for at least 30 days.
But even with a functioning beacon, the signal can only be heard underwater with special equipment and can diminish depending upon the ocean depth, water currents and whether the boxes are buried in silt or sand.
An advisory committee to the US Federal Aviation Administration began a three-day meeting in Washington on Monday about whether transmitter standards should be strengthened.
Some newer airliners already stream much of the same information recorded by black boxes back to their home base via satellite. Airlines do this so they know whether there are any problems that require maintenance or repairs.
If they get the information while the plane is in the air, they can have mechanics and parts in place when it lands, saving time and money. But if planes also streamed back altitude, airspeed and route information, it could provide critical clues for search teams.
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