The new parts of the plane which have been found include part of a landing gear, a left wing panel, one of the GE engines and a portion of the fuselage. The cockpit voice and flight data recorders have not been found, but neither have the parts of the plane where they are normally located.
Corrosion, which is the enemy of the black boxes, is not likely to have infiltrated at the current depth, so the search is optimistic. Whatever is found will supplement the last Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (Acars) error messages that were sent by the failing Airbus.
The debris field appears to be in a flat area within a larger area of subterranean mountainous topography.
The ship Ile de Sein from the company Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN), equipped with a ROV from Phoenix International Inc., will be undertaking the fifth phase of maritime operations, directed by the BEA and financed by the French State.
In a statement about the search, the BEA director Jean-Paul TROADEC said “to check the predictive ability of the drift calculations… drift buoys were dropped, at the BEA’s initiative, from a French Navy aircraft at the beginning of June 2010 in the area of the accident. Tracking them via satellites in the following weeks demonstrated the turbulent nature of the currents in this region and thus the difficulty of predictions.
Analysis of all of the results from the previous searches allowed the BEA to deduce that the zones that had previously been searched using sonar did not need to be explored again, given the performance of this type of equipment.
This was why phase 4 was based on the strategy of a systematic search of all of the zones not explored up to then during phase 2 by the IFREMER SAR sonar and during phase 3 by the REMUS and ORION sonars. This thus led to covering the whole of the remaining area of 10,000 km2 in the Circle.
The study carried out by Metron at the request of the BEA thus consisted, based on analysis of all of the surface and undersea search data since the accident, to attributing degrees of probability of the presence of wreckage to the various regions in the Circle, given that that those that had been covered by sonar were considered “clear”.
This study, published on the BEA website on 20 January 2011, indicated a strong possibility for discovery of the wreckage near the centre of the Circle. It was in this area that it was in fact discovered after one week of exploration thanks to the performance of the REMUS AUV’s operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.”
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