Debris confirms crash of Air France Flight 447

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-06-03 14:01

A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane — which can fly low over the ocean for 12 hours at a time and has radar and sonar designed to track submarines underwater — and a French AWACS radar plane are joining the operation.

France also has three military patrol aircraft flying over the central Atlantic, two commercial ships reached the floating debris, and Brazilian navy ships were en route.

Even at great underwater pressure, the black boxes "can survive indefinitely almost," said Bill Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia.

"They're very rugged and sophisticated, virtually indestructible."

Voss said he expected the recovery process to go quickly.

"I'm hoping they'll have stuff up in a month, if not just a few weeks," he said.

Rescuers were still scanning a vast sweep of ocean. If no survivors are found, it would be the world's worst civil aviation disaster since the November 2001 crash of an American Airlines jetliner in the New York City borough of Queens that killed 265 people.

Investigators have few clues to help explain what brought the Airbus A330 down. The crew made no distress call before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost cabin pressure and electrical failure.

Brazilian officials described a three-mile strip of wreckage, and have refused to draw any conclusions about what that pattern means. But Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, D.C., and former accident investigator for airlines and aircraft manufacturers, said it could indicate the Air France jetliner came apart before it hit the water.

A debris field of that length that is strung out in a rough line rather than in a circle, especially when an airplane comes down from a high altitude, "typically indicates it didn't come down in one piece," Casey said. "But it doesn't have to be a jillion little pieces. It can come down in three or four main pieces, and then the ocean drift takes care of the rest."

Casey cautioned it's possible, although less likely, that the plane did not break apart and spread of the debris field is due entirely to ocean drift. Since the disaster happened in violent weather, thunderstorms and deep ocean swells could have scattered the debris during the 32 hours that passed before it was spotted on Tuesday.

"The big thing to understand right now is we don't know," said Casey, chief operation officer of Safety Operating Systems LLB. "These are tough airplanes. They don't just come apart."

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