Vision system helps search team retrieve recorders from Air France Flight 447 wreckage
The French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) announced that its search team has retrieved the cockpit voice recorder from thewreckage of Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the mid-Atlantic in June 2009. This follows by one day the retrieval of the flight data recorder.
The investigation team localized and identified the cockpit voice recorder at 2150 UTC on 2 May, 2011. It was raised by aREMORA 6000 remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and then lifted on board the Ile de Sein rescue ship. The REMORA 6000 is manufactured by Phoneix International (Largo, MD, USA) and generally uses one Kongsberg Simrad 1367 color CCD video camera with remote zoom and focus and one Simrad 1324 ultra low light SIT camera, along with two manipulating arms.
The search mission also includes three REMUS 6000 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which use sonar to detect the debris on the seafloor and downward-facing, Pike F-421B FireWire cameras from Allied Vision Technologies (Stadtroda, Germany) to map the area and image the wreckage.
The REMUS 6000 AUV was designed byWoods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) under a cooperative program involving the US Naval Oceanographic Office and the Office of Naval Research, and built by Hydroid (Pocasset, MA, USA). Two of the vehicles in the search are owned by the Waitt Institute and operated by WHOI; the third is owned and operated by Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR (Kiel, Germany). These vehicles are designed to operate in depths up to 6000 meters (19,685 feet or 3.73 miles).
SOURCE:BEA
Posted byVision Systems Design