Black box of doomed Rio-Paris Air France flight recovered, say investigators

France24 ^ | 1 May 2011

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Search teams recovered the memory unit of one of the “black boxes” of the Air France Rio-Paris plane that crashed in the Atlantic in June 2009, investigators said Sunday. The crash had killed all 228 people on board.

AP - France’s air accident investigation agency says an undersea search has located the flight data recorder from the 2009 Air France flight that went down in the mid-Atlantic. In a statement, the BEA said the black box was “localized and identified” on Sunday morning. The statement included photos of the recorder - a red cylinder partially buried in sand on the sea floor.

Investigators hope that the black box will help determine what caused the June 1, 2009 crash of Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to the French capital, Paris.

All 228 people on board were killed when the aircraft plunged into a remote area of the Atlantic during a thunderstorm.

The bulk of the wreckage was only recently discovered in a deep-sea search.

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WSJ(5/13) Investigators Hopeful On Crash Data (as cited by Morningstar)

Fairly decent journalism concerning aspects of the FDR & CVR that have been recovered.

> ...air-safety experts fear the plane's impact or the intense water pressure on the sea floor could have damaged the protections, allowing corrosive brine to leak in. The two cylinders containing the data cards were transported from the ship in demineralized water to avoid the risk of further corrosion.

BEA experts will first remove the chips from the casings and wash them to remove all salt. The memory cards will then be dried in a special oven for at least 12 hours. They will be inspected with a microscope for damage and tested to see if they still function, Mr. Menez said.

The drying process has sparked debate among technical experts about the best and safest way to handle the recorders without jeopardizing data. Some specialists say the chips should dry gradually, over three to five days, to prevent delamination -- separation into layers -- or other internal damage.

Mr. Menez said his team will move judiciously. If the cards appear to be in good condition after 12 hours, they will be plugged into a new black box linked to a computer. All the information on the cards will copied onto an encrypted hard disk for analysis.

If the memory cards are damaged or unreadable, engineers will attempt to extract data more directly from the individual chips. Industry officials say the BEA has been seeking advice from chip makers on how to do this. Specialists from Honeywell International Inc., which produced the black boxes, are standing by to assist if necessary,BEA officials said...

EXCERPTED: read the entire article at the above link.

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What to expect from the recorders: the CVR will give info not only concerning in-cockpit conversation, but also on any audible alarms, pilot commentary about visual alarms, and ambient noises such as switches thrown, levers moved through various detents, engine speeds, passenger hysteria, etc...

Forensics on the solid-state memory will take at least a day utilizing established accident investigation procedures pertainent to record-to-wire or tape technology. Presumably the the entire contents of the recorder will be read so as to collect every readable bit of the medium (in physical bit order), and then reconstruct the logical data from there. Basically a sector-by-sector (image) backup of a hard drive, rather than a logical file-by-file backup. And then investigators will work with the backed up image(s) of the original device (which will be treated as 'evidence'). Advanced recovery techniques will be focused specifically on those arbitrary bits that are unreadable. Extraction of 'stubborn' bits will be slotted into the image backup as appropriate.

On a digital data recorder individual chunks have a unique timestamp, so even if the high level structural data - file system metadata - on the memory device is lost they'll still will be able to reconstruct some portion of the data stream (regardless of the physical order the data is encountered on the media). This could be an issue due to the inherent random nature of physical addresses utilized for writing any arbitrary block of data to flash-memory. Flash-memory firmware is designed to scatter each data block across the entire spectrum of available physical addresses. Its one of the reasons one should never defrag a thumb-drive if one desires to prolong its lifespan.

Then the job of translating each parameter into a graph, then synchronising all these parameters together will take a long time (e.g., matching individual flight control input to the observed effect on the flight surface and a subsequent reaction of the aircraft). Then everything will be correlated to forensic examination of the engines - both physical and a possible read-out of their EEC memory - and the airframe components that have been recovered...

I wouldn'nt expect anything accurate, i.e., official preliminary results, to be released for at least a couple of months or so. The final results won't be released for at least another year (or more). However, keep an eye out on new procedures or recommendations released by Airbus and/or other airlines in the interim.

A good explanation of the process, alas ! in French:

YouTube

Recovery of airplane parts has continued over the past few days, with one engine and the avionics bay, containing onboard computers, having been raised. Click on below thumb-nails for high res image:

(hi-res: 2835x1886)

(hi-res: 1886 x 2835)

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From Flightglobal:

AF447 flight-data and cockpit-voice recorder data is readable

French investigators have confirmed that the flight recorders from the crashed Air France Airbus A330-200s contain readable data.

The Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses said it had retrieved "all of the data" from the flight-data recorder and the "whole recording" of the final two hours of flight from the cockpit-voice recorder.

"Following operations to open, extract, clean and dry the memory cards from the flight recorders, BEA safety investigators were able to download the data over the weekend," it says.

"All of this data will now be subjected to detailed in-depth analysis."

BEA says it expects the work to take several weeks but will publish another interim report into the 1 June 2009 accident "during the summer".

The flight-data recorder was retrieved from the wreck of flight AF447 on 1 May while the cockpit-voice recorder was similarly recovered on 3 May.

Confirmation by BEA

Good thing I did a search on the boards before posting this. Discussion continues http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2720523/posts

[af_vet_rr]

ANYTHING-ANYTHING-ANYTHING to cover-up that Molsem terrorists destroyed "yet another" jet aircraft filled with civilians ....

The aircraft manufacturer and investors/owners would be ecstatic if it was terrorists and not a manufacturing flaw, but you keep on spouting your Alex Jones/World Net Daily theories, because a lot of us find them hilarious for being so detached from reality.