Renewed Submarine Search Effort Raises Questions - Air France Flight 447 ULB

Remember this tragedy?

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The loss of Air France's Flight # 447, with 228 people on board, raised obvious forensic questions. Now, the world may safely rule out an act of terrorism, but not necessarily a criminal act. Neither of the aircraft's 2 black boxes has reportedly been recovered, and expected battery life of related underwater locator beacons has long since expired. In late July, the search for the black boxes entered its second phase, with a French research vessel resuming the search using a towed sonar array.

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On 20 August, it had been announced that the black-box search was halted. At the end of August, however, the BEA had announced it would resume the search in the Northern hemisphere's autumn of 2009. Last month, France's Minister of State for Cooperation indicated the third phase of search for the black boxes will commence in February 2010.[14]

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In July 2009, Airbus again advised A330 and A340 operators to change the Thales pitot tubes to newer Goodrich ones. On September 3, 2009, the American FAA issued a final Airworthiness Directive requiring pitot probes manufactured by Thales Avionics that were still installed on A330 or A340 aircraft to be replaced with probes manufactured by Goodrich, to prevent airspeed discrepancies that "could result in reduced control of the airplane."

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M.E. does not believe the loss of Flight 447 is connected with Islamist terrorism. Due to the number of notable passengers, criminal acts cannot yet be ruled out yet. No related extortion or blackmail threats of any passengers or crew have been publicized, however.

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The search effort brings 3 obvious questions to mind. First, had the ULB signal actually been located but not recovered earlier? French search teams had denied an earlier report that a "very weak" signal had been picked up from the black box locator beacon.[90] If so, why were no black boxes recovered then? Very deep depth and availability of a suitable recovery asset might explain the delay, and an important tenet of modern maritime recovery operations is NEVER TO REVEAL the LOCATION of OBJECTS BENEATH the SEA UNTIL AFTER ALL REVOVERIES HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL.

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There are simply many legal and national military reasons for this doctrine of secrecy. The public, therefore, does not really know whether a partial recovery had been made earlier. If not, the simple reason could be the very depth of the box(es) and availability of suitable recovery asset might explain the delay.

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The final question is, if the ULB had not actually been located earlier, how could one expect to retrieve black boxes now? Two possible answers to that question are self-evident, since any expectation of recovery in such circumstances would be close to zero.

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Here are the simplest possibilities.

1) The public has not been clued in as to all of the detection modes applicable to locating the black boxes (most likely for reasons of air transport security).

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2) The renewed search is really a cover story explaining the presence of other submarine activities in the search vicinity. France and Brazil are collaborating in nuclear submarine construction plans.

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Neither of the simple explanations may seem realistic to some. If you are one of the doubters, you may consider yourself in the majority that have not been paying attention to submarines very long.

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Submarines are always silent and strange.