SPECIALISTS TRY TO RESUME SEARCH FOR A-320 FLIGHT RECORDERS AT SEA
by Lev Nezdorovin

ITAR-TASS News Agency
May 17, 2006 Wednesday

Notwithstanding bad weather specialists are trying to resume the search
for the flight recorders from the Armenian Airbus-320 passenger plane
that crashed into the Black Sea off Sochi on May 3.

“The swell on the sea is increasing and it is beginning to rain in
the search area. And yet the ship Navigator is trying to position
itself and sink the RT-1000 apparatus for work on the seabed,” an
official at the search operation technical support headquarters told
Itar-Tass on Wednesday.

On Tuesday work was interrupted by a strong side wind that constantly
carried away the Navigator, which is operating the RT-1000. The wind
subsided at about midnight and the apparatus was lowered to the seabed
between 1 a.m. (2100 GMT) and 6 a.m. (0200 GMT) but no flight recorders
were found.

Silt on the seabed complicated the work, covering the video camera
and the searchlights. The team had to raise the apparatus several
times to clean them. It takes 40 minutes for the apparatus to sink
and as much to come back to the surface.

The apparatus had not participated in such operations before. It
raised only geological samples weighing up to 20 kilogrammes and did
not work at such depths.

The device is capable to lift fragments of a plane weighing up to
12 kilogrammes and the two flight recorders, each weighing seven
kilogrammes, the head of the Federal Agency for Sea and River
Transport, Alexander Davydenko, said.

The RT-1000 is a system consisting of control and lifting equipment
and the apparatus itself with photo and video equipment and a hydraulic
manipulator operating in all directions.

Davydenko said, “It will take two to three days to lift [the flight
recorders]. Everything will depend on the weather.”

He said the operation would involve several groups of 18 people. Each
will work for eight hours.

The Navigator’s crew obtained the first television image of the flight
recorders lying at the depth of almost 500 metres, using the top-notch
research complex Kalmar.

The Kalmar equipment was provided by the department for salvage and
emergency operations based in the port city of Novorossisk.

The designer of the complex, the Russian corporation Tetis-Pro,
made the Kalmar for the Russian Navy. When the A-320 crashed, the
complex, which includes a sonic depth-tester having the functions of
a side-looking sonar, was still in the phase of testing.

The Kalmar is capable of tracking down objects at the depths of down
to 600 meters.

The flight recorders are lying on the seabed 496 metres from the
surface and about five metres apart. “The visibility is sufficient
for the work to be done,” the minister said.

Flight recorders used on aircraft of the Airbus-320 type withstand
the depth of up to 6,000 meters for 30 days, experts from the French
air crash investigation bureau said.

They said that flight recorders’ radio beacons keep working during
the 30-day period.

One of the flight recorders registers flight parameters, including the
speed, height and direction of the flight and the autopilot operation,
each second. The other gadget records conversations in the cockpit.

Each flight recorder weighs 10 kilograms, including a seven-kilogram
armoured casing for the gadget. The casing can withstand water pressure
at a depth of 6,000 meters, the temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius,
and the compression of 2.2 tonnes.

The bureau retrieved flight recorders from the depth of over 1,000
meters in the Red Sea in January 2004, when an Egyptian plane crashed
near the Sharm-el-Sheikh resort. The rescuers were using a Scorpio
deep-water apparatus.

A technical commission investigating the Sochi air crash, which is
led by the CIS Interstate Aviation Committee, has asked French experts
to help find A-320 flight recorders.

Of 113 people who were abroad the plane, 51 bodies have been found
so far.

The Airbus A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia plunged into the
Black Sea as it was making a landing manoeuvre in the early hours of
May 3. The accident claimed the lives of 113 people.