Mini-Sub Has Made Multiple Dives on Titanic

A 26-foot-long French submarine is being rushed to the likely site where Air France Flight 447 impacted the Atlantic Ocean a week ago, in hopes of locating the Airbus A330's cockpit voice and flight data recorders. Finding the black boxes is crucial to determining the cause of the in-flight breakup of the aircraft.

According to Discovery News, the Nautile, and her mother ship Pourquoi Pas? (Why Not?) were pulled from a research mission to help in the search. "The priority for us is to find the black boxes," said Vincent Rigaud, head of the French marine research institute Ifremer's underwater system department. "We will do everything we can to find them."

The topography in the area where Flight 447 went down in as much as 13,000 feet of water is mountainous, and the debris field could be very large given the nature of the accident. Nautile has made numerous dives on the North Atlantic wreck of Titanic, and its crews are used to operating in those kinds of conditions. Nautile carries a three-person crew, and is equipped with multiple cameras and panoramic sonar to help locate the devices. If they're found, robotic arms will be used to pick them up off the ocean floor. Nautile has been used in aircraft recovery operations in the past.

But Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the French accident investigation agency BEA, remains skeptical that the recorders will ever be found. Multiple factors can affect the locator signals emitted by the devices, including water temperature, density, and salinity.

Pourquie Pas? and Nautile are expected to be on site by Wednesday or Thursday of this week.

FMI http://www.ifremer.fr/fleet/systemes_sm/engins/nautile.htm