AF447: Black Boxes within 5 qkm, French Navy says

[DenisG]

New hope to find the black boxes of AF447 that vanished over the Atlantic on June 1st, 2009. With a new software from Thales, the French Navy announced that they have determined an area of 5 square kilometers in 3000m depth on the basis of signals, a French submarine had detected last year. Of course no certainty that they may ever be found, but some news on the issue, which moved me very strongly last year.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/af447-experts-french-nuclear-submarine-located-zone-black/story?id=10572247

Denis

[swiftus27]

thats still a ton of area to cover.  With hope, they find it.  Its a shame so many died over pitot tubes.

[DenisG]

Yes and it will be very important to find the truth on what happened up there. There has been much speculation, many theories, but in the end, we need to know what brought this airliner down. I personally do not believe that pitot tubes may have caused this, it's very different from the crash off the coast of the Dominicanian Republic in the 1990s.
Denis

[ban2]

i was told from an airbus pilot that the propable cause was frozen tubes and there is a query as to why the pilots flew through the storm rather than around it.

i also wonder why in this day and age of modern technology why are anti ice systems still manually operated rather than automatic?

[pattN]

they are not manually operated on an a330, they were intended to work in icy conditions but obviously the specific weather conditions in that thunderstorm cell were far above what was tested and has worked for years...
there is indeed the open question why didn´t the flightcrew divert? but thats their company business.

pattN