Air France black box seeking sub is Titanic veteran

The mini-submarine that France is sending to search for the black boxes of the Air France Airbus plane that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean has in the past scooped up silverware from the Titanic and plugged holes in a sunken oil tanker.

The eight-metre long Nautile and its sister submarine, the Victor 6000, are on their way to the crash zone aboard the oceanographic research ship Pourquoi Pas? (Why Not?). The pair were due to arrive in the search area earlier this week.

"If they can locate the general zone that the black boxes are in, there's a very good chance that the Nautile can find it," said Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the vessel's chief pilot from 1986 to 1996. "There's hardly any other sub in the world that can go so deep, detect so much, and manoeuver so well."

The Pourquoi Pas? mini-sub will join as many as seven other ships and 11 airplanes looking for debris of the Airbus SAS A330-200 that broke up June 1 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board. The search is focused on a zone about 650km (405 miles) northeast of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha island, off the northeastern coast.

"The current operations are intended to collect as much debris as possible before they are dispersed by winds and currents," Christophe Prazuck, a spokesman for the French military, said at a briefing on June 4. "It's a mission that's counted in hours or days. The Pourquoi Pas? will look for the black boxes, which can take weeks."

Black boxes contain data from the flight, such as its speed and altitude, and any communication from the pilots. They emit signals for 30 days after an accident, and in calm conditions can be detected up to 3000m away, said Nargeolet, who recovered 10 black boxes during his Nautile career.

The recorders are actually bright orange, to distinguish them from other equipment in black or gray casings.

To find a flight recorder, ships on the surface drag underwater devices that listen for the characteristic ‘ping' sound the boxes emit. Only once the general area of a recorder has been determined, do subs such as the Nautile descend to locate the exact position and bring it up. A French military sub is also being sent to help listen for the recorders.

"The hardest part of the mission is locating the general area," said Nargeolet, who also served in the French Navy.

The 63-year-old, who lives most of the year in Greenwich, Connecticut, spoke in a telephone interview from Brittany.

The water's depth in the area ranges from 1,000 to 3,000m, with the sea floor resembling a mountain range, said Paul-Louis Arslanian, director of the French Aviation Accidents Investigation Bureau at a press conference last week.

It's the sort of mission the Nautile was designed for. The sub has carried out 1,500 dives since 1984 and is capable of reaching 97 percent of ocean floors, according to Ifremer, the French oceanography research institute that owns it.

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