Urgent hunt for black box a race against a battery_美文

Urgent hunt for black box a race against a battery

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Searchers for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 must gear up their hunt for the aircraft's black box, an aviation expert said as an Australian ship carrying equipment to locate the device set sail on Monday.

It is presumed that the black box will run out of battery power around April 7, or April 12 at the latest, and its signal will then vanish, said Wang Ya'nan, deputy editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine.

"I don't want to be pessimistic," Wang said, "but the fact is that without the signal, it will be virtually impossible to find it."

In the case of the search for Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, nearly two years were required for retrieval of the black box, even though the crash site was located within a week of the accident.

"The French detected the signal sent from the black box before it lost power and determined the approximate site," Wang said. "The reason so much time was needed to raise it was that the water's depth made it very difficult to finalize the precise location."

Even if every nation involved in the search put all their deep-sea submersibles into the operation, there would not be enough of them to cover the enormous swath of ocean where the small device could be, he said.

To quickly narrow the search for MH370, searchers need to find surface debris, he said.

The black box consists of two separate pieces of equipment: a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder. The boxes are usually kept in the tail of an aircraft.