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Al-Ahram: Airbus fanget opp signaler fra styrtet fly

Flyprodusenten Airbus skal ha greid å fange opp signaler i havområdet der et EgyptAir-fly styrtet i forrige uke. Snart starter dypvannssøket etter flyet og de svarte boksene.
Signalene Airbus skal ha fanget opp kommer fra en av flyets tre nødpeilesendere. Disse blir aktivert enten manuelt eller automatisk ved en ulykke, melder det statlige egyptiske nyhetsbyrået Al-Ahram ifølge CNN.
Det er ikke kjent når Airbus skal ha fanget opp signalene, eller om senderen fortsatt befinner seg i eller i nærheten av flyvraket. Signaler fra slike sendere fanges vanligvis opp av satellitter noen timer etter ulykken, ikke flere dager senere. Et eventuelt signal vil kunne bidra til å begrense leteområdet til en radius på omtrent 5 kilometer, melder CNN.
Airbus har ifølge Al-Ahram oversendt opplysningene som er innhentet fra senderen til egyptiske myndigheter, som har videreformidlet dem til letemannskapene som forsøker å finne flyet på havbunnen.


Fransk skipHavet er mellom 2.400 og 3.000 meter dypt i området der flyet styrtet, og franske luftfartsmyndigheter sier dypvannssøket etter flyvraket og de såkalte svarte boksene starter i løpet av de nærmeste dagene.
– Leteinnsatsen på dypt vann starter når det franske overvåkingsskipet La Place kommer til området, opplyser myndighetene, som samarbeider med egypterne for å finne ut hva som skjedde da flyet med 66 personer om bord forsvant fra radaren og styrtet i havet 19. mai.
La Place er utstyrt med tre detektorer som kan fange opp signaler fra de svarte boksene. Det blir også vurdert å sette inn ytterligere ett skip, som har kapasitet til å utforske havbunnen og hente opp eventuelle funn fra 3.000 meters dyp.


TidspressSøket er en kamp mot klokken, ettersom boksene som inneholder flyets ferdskriver og lydopptak fra cockpiten bare kan sende ut signaler i en måneds tid.
Det er funnet noen vrakrester fra det savnede Airbus A320-flyet, som var på vei fra Paris til Kairo da det styrtet. Leteområdet på mer enn 74 kvadratkilometer ligger halvveis mellom havnebyen Alexandria i Egypt og den greske øya Kreta. (NTB)

Stein Jarle Olsen

Hunt for EgyptAir Black Boxes Boosted by French Navy Search Ship

Laplace leaves Corsica for crash zone in eastern Mediterranean
Flight recorders vital to probe may lose power within weeks

The French Navy has sent one of its most advanced survey vessels to lead the search for the submerged wreckage of the EgyptAir jet destroyed over the eastern Mediterranean last week.

The Laplace has left Porto Vecchio in Corsica and will arrive at the likely crash site over the weekend, deploying specialist technology to pick up telltale "pings" from the Airbus Group SE A320's black-box flight recorders in waters thought to be more than 3,000 meters (9,850 feet) deep.

Regarded as key to determining what brought down Flight MS804 while en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board, the data and voice recorders -- actually colored orange -- are detectable only from within a few miles, and are likely to run out of power in about three weeks.

Discussions are underway on drafting in a second ship equipped with robot-exploration and lifting equipment for the eventual retrieval of the recorders, France's air-accident investigator said Friday. Two officials from the BEA, involved because Airbus is based in Toulouse, will travel on the Laplace.

Underwater Probes
The ship, named after celebrated French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, will carry three Detector 6000 underwater listening systems supplied by the Alseamar unit of Paris-based search specialist Alcen, a veteran of air-crash searches that also works with defense and oil-industry clients.
The probes, shaped like torpedoes and dragged beneath the ship, have an "extremely long detection range," according to Alseamar, being able to detect pings from black boxes 5 kilometers (3 miles) away. Egypt said Thursday the deployment of more specialist gear would "help speed up" the search effort.
Among previous projects, Alseamar worked on the recovery of the black boxes from a Flash Airlines Boeing Co. 737 that crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff from Sharm el-Sheikh in 2004, killing all 148 passengers and crew.

Last year's loss of an Airbus A321 operated by Russia's Metrojet, apparently blown up over Sinai by a terrorist bomb, killing 224, posed relatively fewer challenges, with the flight recorders easily found in the desert landscape.

Too Deep
The Egyptian-led investigation team will still need to narrow down the location of the MS804 wreck to bring the French technology to bear. Previous attempts to find the jet using a submarine were hampered by the lack of a well-defined search area and the depth of the water where it seems to have come down.
Experts remain unclear about what destroyed the Airbus. While human remains so far recovered indicate a catastrophic incident such as a bomb, bodies can also be ripped apart when an aircraft disintegrates following a structural failure, or hits the ground or sea at high velocity.

A string of error messages sent automatically minutes before the A320 plunged into the sea indicated that smoke had been detected beneath the cockpit and in a lavatory, and that windows next to the co-pilot's seat may have been broken, together with unspecified issues with flight computers.
While those readings might be explained in terms of a bomb blast, they could equally have resulted from a fire and associated electrical failure.

Commander Benjamin Chauvet, a spokesman for the French navy, told reporters at a briefing in Paris Thursday that the search zone remains too wide to quickly home in on the black boxes. Waters in the area are also particularly polluted, forcing searchers to sift through unrelated debris, he said.
Signals from the A320's emergency locater transmitter may have identified an area with a 5-kilometer radius, the state-owned Ahram Gate website said, citing Ayman Al Moqadem, Egypt's air-accident investigation chief.

An aircraft ELF emits a radio signal -- separate to the flight recorder pings -- detectable by satellite in the event of a crash, though the beacon wouldn't normally function underwater.

Egypt detects signal from missing jet Egyptian investigators said yesterday that they had detected a signal from the missing EgyptAir Flight 804. If confirmed it could mark a decisive step forward in the international hunt for the jet, which disappeared over the Mediterranean last Thursday with 66 people on board. The "pings" come from an emergency location transmitter attached to the main body of the aircraft which emits a distress signal via satellite in the event of a violent collision or a crash into the water. The devices are used to help in search and rescue efforts. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/egypt-detects-signal-from-missing-jet-whzcmtsrk Back to Top

MS804 Mystery Endures An international team of searchers using air, surface and autonomous submarine equipment has not yet been able to locate the main wreckage field nor the flight data and cockpit voice recorders for EgyptAir Flight 804 (MS804), the AirbusA320-200 that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on May 19 on a flight from Paris to Cairo.  The hope is that the recorders will shed light on what caused the aircraft to abruptly stop sending surveillance data from a quiescent cruise flight at 37,000 ft., and minutes later, crash into the ocean approximately 200 mi. north of Egypt's coastline. Shortly before the data transmissions cut off at 2:27 a.m. Cairo time, the aircraft issued seven cryptic, autonomous messages through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). The messages, confirmed by Airbus and others, indicate window heat anomalies in the cockpit, smoke in a lavatory, avionics bay smoke, and several flight-control computer faults, but do not give clues as to the underlying issues on the aircraft. Smoke alerts are based on optical detectors. Rockwell Collins says the messages were routed through its air-to-ground data link communications service and sent to EgyptAir. "With the limited data available, the analysis of these messages does not allow us to establish the sequence of events that would explain the loss of flight MS804," Airbus cautioned in an Accident Information Transmission sent to all Airbus operators on May 21. "Pending more data becoming available (in particular, flight data recorders and aircraft parts), Airbus has no specific recommendations to raise at this stage of the investigation." Egypt, which is heading up the probe, reported on May 24 that 18 "groups of wreckage" had been sent to criminal research laboratories in Cairo, in part for DNA testing. To date, published images of wreckage include only life vests, small fragments of aircraft parts and some passenger belongings. Initial concerns around the industry focused on a bomb or terrorist action, coming on the heels of the Oct. 31, suspected bombing of a Metrojet Airbus A321 climbing out of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt and headed for St. Petersburg, Russia. Although the investigation continues, Russia had earlier stated that a bomb was to blame for the inflight breakup. Terrorists also claimed responsibility for the failed attempt to bring down a Daallo Airlines A321 over Somalia in February. In that incident, a passenger suspected of having a laptop computer bomb detonated the device in a window seat near the wing, blowing a hole in the aircraft and ejecting the suspect. The aircraft landed safely. Along with ACARS, Egyptian investigators are also accessing the Egyptair aircraft and crew documents as well as the aircraft maintenance and analysis information for the A320, which was built in 2003. Over the three days prior to the accident, the aircraft had made stops at several different airports, including Tunis, Tunisia; Asmara, Eritrea; Brussels, and Alexandria, Egypt. The Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee says MS804's captain had 6,275 flight hours of experience, with 2,101 hr. in the A320, and the first officer had 2,766 hr. While much of the investigation will hinge on the recorders, it is not clear whether the problem that incapacitated the surveillance system would have also cut data to the recorders. As such, the crash will likely reignite discussions concerning contingency mode tracking, data recorder streaming capabilities and other emergency actions and systems that could generate more information on the state of an aircraft in distress. Standards and practices recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) after the disappearance of MH370 in March 2013 are focused on determining aircraft position every 15 min. for normal operations (applicable in 2018), and every 1 min. in cases of abnormal or distressed conditions (applicable in 2021), even if the aircraft's power is lost. Recorder streaming services are seen as a longer-term initiative, however. A mandate by the United Nations that takes effect next summer could help pave the way for some airlines to jump ahead much sooner. According to Mark Thompson, president and CEO of Thompson Aerospace, anyone who leases an aircraft that will fly U.N. missions after that time will have to provide enhanced tracking that includes reports of position, altitude, speed and other data every 3 min. during normal operations, with a distress mode that outputs the data every 1 min., based either on rapid ascent or descent or the pilots pressing an "alert button." Along with position reports, the system must also allow for text and email messaging between the crew and ground during an emergency. Thompson has a low-cost tracking system that meets the U.N. requirements, but also a more comprehensive solution that for contingency modes can stream flight data and, perhaps more importantly, cockpit voice recorder information to the cloud for secure retrieval by the airlines. "We envision when going into abnormal mode or distress mode you start sending cockpit audio into the cloud all the time," says Thompson.