EgyptAir - Search goes on - Curt Lewis

Closing in on Egypt Air 'black boxes'





The Egypt Air disaster may have dropped out of the news briefly, but the investigation continues apace to find out why flight MS804 crashed.

French investigators think they have heard locator-beacon signals from at least one of the "black box" flight recorders, and now salvage experts are heading to the site to take a closer look.
Hearing the beacons is one thing, but they won't know for sure what they have found until they send down a robotic submarine armed with bright lights and cameras.

"Black boxes" are, in fact, bright orange and have reflective strips, so they show up pretty well when you shine lights on them.

The robotic submarine is on a special salvage ship, called the John Lethbridge.
The sub has claws (manipulator arms) that can pick things up and bring them to the surface.

I have spoken to a marine salvage expert, David Mearns, who has decades of experience looking for shipwrecks and lost aircraft.

It had a different name then, but he used the John Lethbridge in 2001 to photograph the wrecks of the warships Bismarck and HMS Hood.

This is also a man who once ran an operation to pick up every single piece of a crashed aircraft that had sunk 3,800m (12,500ft) to the sea bed on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea (actually the Tyrrhenian Sea off western Italy).

It took his team two years to recover all the debris.
Mr Mearns is not involved in this search, but he knows crew members on the John Lethbridge, and ocean recovery is a small, specialised world.

His best guess, and it's just that because he doesn't know all the details, is that, with a fair wind, the team with the robot sub could be on site within three or four days.
They have to stock up in port first.

"If they're really lucky, they could find the black boxes on their first dive," he told me, "but it all depends."
"It is not unusual for the underwater locater beacons, or pingers, to have been knocked off the black boxes during the crash."

Where missing EgyptAir plane had been in past 24 hours
In the meantime, Mr Mearns thinks that the ship, Lalplace, that initially heard the pingers, will have remained on site to sweep back and forth, listening out for more locator-beacon signals.
They go in set patterns, figure of eights or clover leaves, "to get the best possible range and bearings from which they can calculate a more accurate position of the black boxes on the seabed".
If they have found the plane, he says, investigators are faced with a choice.

Potential crime scene

"This is potentially a crime scene," he said.
"So, they could decide to sonar map and photograph the entire debris field before touching anything.
"That may be an area as small as 1km [0.6 miles] by 1km depending on how the plane broke up.
"Or they may choose to bring the boxes up quickly, because that could give them an early answer."
Recovering aircraft from under the sea is time consuming and complex.
The robot subs, operated by experts on the surface, can bring up small pieces weighing maybe 100kg (15st) in their claws.

You can also strap bigger parts, weighing about 500kg, to the subs.
But the really big pieces, such as the engines or tail for example, require specialist heavy lifting equipment.

First, they have to confirm they have heard a "black box".
Then, they have to find it, recover it, dry the circuits out - that takes a day or two - and download the data.

There are two boxes on board.

The cockpit voice recorder should reveal what the crew thought was happening.
You would hear what they said to each other, plus all the alarms in the background.
The flight data recorder should reveal what the plane's computers thought was happening.
The limited evidence so far points to an on-board fire.

But the "black boxes" might not be able to tell us whether it was started deliberately or not.
They may end up having to recover large parts of the aircraft to know for sure, and that is a long job
.

Second specialist vessel to join EgyptAir search on Friday

File photo of an Egyptian military search boat takes part in a search operation for the EgyptAir plane that disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea in this still image taken from video May 19, 2016. Egyptian Military/Handout via Reuters TV

A second ship equipped with specialist search devices will join the hunt for the "black box" flight recorders and the wreckage of an EgyptAir jet on Friday, the head of France's air-accident investigation agency said on Thursday.

A French naval supply vessel picked up a signal from one of the two recorders on June 1, and Egypt has chartered a second vessel operated by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, equipped with sonar equipment and an underwater vehicle.

Remi Jouty, director of the BEA air accident agency, which is advising Egypt on the underwater search, said the first ship continued to pick up locator signals from the first recorder, whose location had been narrowed to within 1 to 2 kilometres.

Pending the search for the two recorders, the Egyptian-led investigation is still "very far" from understanding why Flight 804 crashed into the Mediterranean on May 19, killing all 66 people on board, Jouty told aviation journalists in Paris.

Each recorder, one containing cockpit voice recordings and the other data from the Airbus A320 jet, is attached to a beacon designed to emit acoustic homing signals for 30 days, giving search teams limited time to detect the second box.

Jouty said he was sorry that French recommendations to extend the battery life to 90 days, first made in December 2009 following the Atlantic crash of an Air France jet and still not implemented worldwide, had taken so long to be acted on. The new rules take effect in 2018 [nL5N18J0JP].

Each recorder is contained inside a strong bright-orange housing and attached to a beacon, or pinger, which sends out acoustic signals about once a second after a crash.

To recover the black boxes from the seabed 3,000 metres below the surface, investigators will need to narrow the signals to within a few metres and establish whether the pingers are still connected to the recorders, Jouty said.

How long it takes after that to recover the crucial pieces of evidence will depend partly on whether they are accessible or trapped inside the aircraft's structure, he told Reuters.

"It is difficult to imagine the recovery taking less than a week once they are located," he added.

Once recovered, the recorders would be handed to Egyptian authorities, who are expected to read them in the country's air crash investigation laboratory in Cairo.

If they are damaged they could be sent abroad for further analysis or back to their U.S. manufacturer, Honeywell.