The French aviation safety agency BEA on Tuesday announced the discovery and recovery of Air France Flight 447’s cockpit voice recorder from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, nearly two years after the Airbus A330-200 disappeared.
The recorder was located late Monday night local time and retrieved early Tuesday morning by the Remora 6000, a US-built remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The discovery comes a day after the same team found and retrieved the airplane’s data recorder.
On June 1st, 2009, Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-200, was enroute to Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport from Rio de Janeiro when it apparently plunged into the Atlantic roughly halfway between South America and Africa, killing all 228 people on board. The cause of the crash has been impossible to determine without the data and voice recorders, which were widely believed to have been unrecoverable due to the extremely deep seas in the area.
Photos of both recorders seemed to indicate that they were relatively intact, but it is not yet known if the data is still recoverable. The intense pressures and temperatures of such depths, as well as the long time elapsed, are well beyond those the recorders were designed to withstand.
