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...French nuclear submarine arrived off the coast of Brazil to join the effort to locate the black box from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, aviation experts stressed the necessity of recovering those cockpit recorders in order to learn what exactly brought down the Airbus A330 and the 228 people on board. In past inquiries into airline disasters, investigators have been able to figure out the cause by piecing together clues from the wreckage itself, sometimes without information from the black box. But after 10 days of searching, the authorities combing what's believed to be Flight 447's crash...
...aeronautic engineer and judicial expert who has participated in past French aviation investigations. "What they do have supports the obvious hypothesis that the plane broke up while still in the air. But with so little debris and few victims recovered this late, they'll really need to get the black box to have any chance of finding out what happened." (See pictures of the search for Flight...
...those kind of altitudes, the gap between excess speed and stalling narrows, especially when you factor in complications like turbulence," says Paul Hayes, director of the London-based Ascend Worldwide fleet consultancy, which advises global airlines and air-transport companies. Without the black box, Hayes adds, the alerts could provide some answers, but not all of them. "Correctly sequencing the cascade of technical reports the plane sent should give investigators clues into what was going wrong as it flew into difficult weather," he says. "At this point, the limited remains of the plane and its passengers recovered will probably...
...enough of it is found, physical evidence can be as helpful as black boxes, or even more helpful, to air-disaster investigators in figuring out what went wrong. Painstaking examination of the wreckage of a New York City-Geneva Swissair flight that mysteriously crashed into the Atlantic in 1998 ultimately revealed a swiftly spreading electrical fire as the cause. Hayes also notes that after the Pan Am 747 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the discovery of metal fragments and an examination of the type of damage to one section of the plane pointed experts to a small bomb...
...pilot and current assistant director of the Bourget Air and Aerospace Museum, outside Paris. "The current Air France investigation will be much harder, since little debris has been recovered, and the material that has - because it floats - will only tell one part of the story at best. Getting the black box is very important...