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20-Jan-2004
Sharm El Sheikh aircraft accident - New success for GIB buoys 5 hours only to relocate black boxes in more than 1000 m of water depth.
While deep intervention ROVs were en route to Sharm El Sheikh, ACSA was mobilized by the French Navy to participate to the search and rescue operations. ACSA's mission was to relocate, as soon as possible, in longitude and latitude the 2 black boxes coordinates. A metric accuracy is a major factor of success for the recovery phase conducted by ROV, specially when visibility is limited to a few meters and when debris are spread over a very large area.
On January 15th, at 12H00, the GIB buoys and special acoustic receivers manufactured by ORCA Instrumentation were deployed on the crash site. Only 5 hours later, the first black box coordinates were made available to "Isle of Batz" ROV's support ship. Shortly after, "Isle of Batz" announced ROV black box recovery in a position very close to ACSA's given coordinates.
This clearly demonstrates that the French Navy decision to mobilize ACSA has allowed to limit the search and recovery phase of the Flash air line black boxes to only a few days. Despite distance (6000 Km away from France by maritime route), great depths, severe acoustic propagation conditions, and debris spread over a very wide area, the total time necessary to successfully conduct the black boxes recovery mission has only been of 14 days. This time is to be compared to similar accidents where, usually, 2 weeks have been necessary to bring back to the surface the data recorders in water depths between 30 to 100 m.
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