HN39;
what I mistook for engine pylon is the wing leading edge.
...not that it's important now but what appears to be the leading edge on the left side of that photo is actually the next flap-track canoe, but your orientation is still correct. I had the orientation wrong in my initial post in answering your original question, thinking we were looking rearwards, at the left wing/gear with the entire leading edge gone. What turned out to be the flap track, I thought was what remained of the left pylon after the sheet-metalwork had been stripped off the support structure. Anyway...it just shows how careful one must be in drawing conclusions even when one knows the airplane.
On the recorders, parameters and what's recorded, the other aspect of this is, though it isn't mentioned in the BEA Reports, this aircraft will also have had a Quick Access Recorder of some sort, for AF's FOQA Program work. The QAR isn't crash-protected and is usually in the EE Bay below the cockpit (for this type). It's source of data are the same (ARINC) buses that feed the DFDR, usually through a DFDAU, (digital flight data aquisition unit) or FDIMU, (flight data interface management unit).
Whether the card or other recording medium and its electronic housing survived the impact and the time underwater is of course an open question, but it IS a source of data which in all likelihood will have many more parameters, (upwards of 2000 - 3000 parameters), and at different sampling rates, than the DFDR.
Time will tell, but I hope there is included in the recovery plans, a search to determine if the QAR recording medium can be found.
Alison;
Completely.