French submarine begins Airbus black box search

Crash search moves, forensics begin
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By Gerard Bon
PARIS (Reuters) - A French submarine with advanced sonar equipment began searching on Wednesday for the flight recorders of an Air France airliner that crashed into the Atlantic last week, the French military said.
The nuclear-powered submarine Emeraude was sent to the area to hunt the "black box" recorders, which may help explain the disaster and which are believed to lie on the ocean floor.
Investigators face a long search for clues to what went wrong when the Airbus A330 jet disappeared on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris killing all 228 people on board, French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said.
"Up to now, the time frame for the search for victims and debris has been of the order of days or a week. Here, at the very least, it's going to be of the order of weeks or months," he told LCI television.
The Air France flight is believed to have run into trouble when it hit a violent storm midway over the Atlantic Ocean and potential problems with speed sensors have become one of the focal points of the inquiry.
But other causes have not been ruled out and on Wednesday, the web site of the French weekly L'Express said that two potentially suspect names had been identified on the passenger list by French intelligence services.
It said the names "correspond to people known for their links to Islamist terrorism," but a French military spokesman said he could not confirm the report.
Authorities have seen no credible claims of responsibility and have said the crash was unlikely to have been caused by an attack but they have not excluded one entirely.
SEARCH
In the search zone, where scattered pieces of debris including a large section from the aircraft tail have been recovered, vessels are trying to comb a rugged area of the ocean floor, thousands of meters below the surface.
Prazuck said searchers had taken two weeks to locate the black box recorders after the crash of a Boeing 737 at Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt in 2004, despite much easier conditions.
"That aircraft crashed very close to the coast, there was no doubt about where the accident happened and it took 15 days to recover the black box," he said. "Here the accident happened 1,000 kilometers from the coast. The situation is very complex."
He said the Emeraude was searching an area of 36 square kilometers and the search zone would be changed daily.
If the recorders are found, miniature submarines from the Pourquoi Pas, a French exploration and survey ship also deployed to the area, could be used to bring them in.
Brazilian military search teams have recovered 41 bodies and moved some of them to the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha off Brazil's northeastern coast, which is being used as a base for the search operations. Continued...
Source: Reuters