As most usual news sources seems to have dropped their talk about the AF447 which disappeared on June 1st 2009 (for my birthday, a few weeks before I took a plane for 11 hours), I’ll post a bit of update from the BEA in France.
Yesterday the BEA announced in a press release that the searches are continuing with the Pourquoi pas ? ship owned by Ifremer and the French Navy, by looking for bigger parts of the plane and hoping to find the black boxes in the same area. The sonar signal the blackboxes have started emitting starting june 1st could only keep emitting for 30 days, and can only be detected within 2km (which may vary with pressure, amount of salt in water at this place, etc).
Victor 6000 (french link) and Nautile (two manned submersible aboard the Pourquoi pas ?) are currently looking at the oceanian floor for parts of the A330-203 F-GZCP, in the areas most likely to contains parts of the plane when considering where and when parts were found, drift speed, etc… in a second episode of the search for black boxes.
If nothing is found, a third search episode on a wider area might happen, with financial support from Airbus.
For now, while the fact the Pitot probes did return wrong speed, the reason why the plane crashed is still not established. I personally wonder about the radio silence from the airplane started near 01.36am while the plane was still able to send ACARS messages more than 30 minutes later.
Debrits found from the plane (red circles are corpes, white circles are debrits, while box is the last known position)
