"Without doubt, the BEA search effort has gathered the best minds and resources to recover the hull and black boxes. It's simply one of the most difficult researches so far undertaken in this 21st Century."
I'm sorry but I could not disagree more strongly. The stipulation within the last tender issued that AUV's would be used for this search raised eyebrows amonst many involved in the subsea search & salvage industry.
An AUV is designed to fly over ideally a flat sandy bottom flying a pre programmed route using waypoints, ideal for a lengthy cable / pipeline / route survey. The terrain involved in the AF447 is about as far from ideal as you could get for the use of AUV's. The second factor being the battery life of an AUV and the time taken to submerge to 4000m, basically by the time it gets down there there is very little time left to actually do any searching before it then needs to start the journey back to the surface.
Basically the use of AUV's are a great way to spend a lot of time messing about without actually getting much searching done, I'll leave it at that.