Brazilian Air force finds plane debris

[Christa]

Breaking now, not much more:

Brasilia - Brazilian air force aircraft searching the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday for a missing Air France flight that had been carrying 228 people have found debris from a plane, an air force spokesperson said.

The "small remains" were located 650km northeast of Brazil's Fernando do Noronha island. It could not immediately be confirmed that the debris was from Air France flight AF 447, the spokesperson aid.

http://www.news24.com/Content/World/News/1073/2221308f49634036bf56b1bdf7b93b6a/02-06-2009%2002-06/Air_force_finds_plane_debris

[malaise]

1. Just heard this on BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8079122.stm

Very good news

[Christa]

2. Thank you!

For the sake of everyone concerned we can only hope it is from the missing plane.

[Canuckistanian]

4. How is that good news?

It's highly unlikely that there are any survivors.

[malaise]

6. We know that part already

but I'm sure relatives would like to know what happened. Finding debris is a start.

[Canuckistanian]

10. I suppose

For the sake of closure for the families.

[WeDidIt]

3. The bulk of the wreckage will never be recovered. The ocean is too deep there.

Thus we will never know the actual cause.

[Blue_Tires]

5. how deep is the water?

[WeDidIt]

8. 5,000 to 15,000 feet

That's somewhere between one and three miles.

Without a specific longitude and latitude, I can't get any more precise than that.

By comparison, TWA Flight 800 went down in 100 feet of water. That took a great deal of time and the recovery was extremely risky.

[malaise]

7. They did find the Titanic

I am always hopeful re human beings and technology

[WeDidIt]

9. Finding it is possible. Pictures of it are possible

Recovering it is not economically feasible. Determining the cause is not really possible without recovery.

[malaise]

11. Valid point n/t

[dgibby]

12. What about a remote controlled submersible with robotic arms

to recover the black boxes? Would that be feasible?

[WeDidIt]

14. It's possible

though determing a cause with just the black boxes probably won't happen in this case given all we know about it.

[Statistical]

16. Another issue is pressure on the blackbox.

Black boxes (which are orange :) ) are built to survive pressure to about 10,000 ft.

If it is deeper than that the box likely will collapse.
Also in even shallower water (say 6,000 ft) if the box was damaged the pressure will finish the job.

Water pressure gets crazy powerful at extreme depths.
It is about 0.44psi per ft. So at 10,000 ft it is over 4,000 psi or about 300x surface air pressure.


Never really realized how "heavy" water is until I started diving. You get a new appreciation even at 100ft down.

[TornadoTN]

13. Recovery is definately going to be extremely difficult - if at all possible

I know that there are some deep-sea salvage teams from the Scandinavian countries, along with Russia and the U.S. that could potentially mount a recovery of some items off of the ocean floor, but it's extremely risky and nowhere near a sure thing.

They had a hard enough time with the Russian nuke sub Kursk at 328.1ft, just to give a comparison. If the wreckage is in small enough pieces, it's possible to recover it through mechanical means, but it will get expensive.

[Captain Hilts]

15. The USN should send some of its salvage ships. They got a lot of the Challenger.

They have a lot of experience looking for planes in deep water.