Search Update
Over the past two days, Ocean Alert has covered about forty square miles, apparently towing sonar equipment. I think that they are mapping a debris field based on their steady slow speed. The western portion of their recent activity is about 33.7846n 035.2819e. By plugging these coordinates into Google Earth, you can see that the water depth there is about 4,200 feet. This appears to be the area that the US Navy and Ocean Alert read the FDR and CVR pingers. Most of the recent activity has been further east, closer to shore near Naame, centered on 33.7587n 035.3938e. The depths here is about 470 feet.
According to the Lebanon's Transportation Minister, Odyssey Explorer, a sister ship to Ocean Alert, will be heading to Beirut soon. It is currently in the UK, maybe Falmouth, about 3,200 miles away. At 8 knots it will be mid February to arrive if it gets underway now. This ship is equipped with two deep diving ROV's capable of doing archeological quality explorations of ancient shipwrecks. It has the ability to extract the boxes from the wreckage if they are still in their aft fuselage mounts.
The width of the apparent debris field indicates that ET409 broke up in the air. The time spent in the eastern portion of the search area indicates that there must be a larger portion of wreckage quite a distances from the CVR & FDR.
It is amazing to be able to witness this search from a laptop computer while in a hotel room on the opposite side of the planet.
If you follow these ships on the web, keep in mind that their tracks only show about a day's data. If you place the cursor on the little triangle symbols on the track, it displays the date, time, and position information.
Last edited by repariit; 1st Feb 2010 at 15:31.