Originally Posted by
Lonewolf_50
It's early yet. The search effort is still underway.
AF 447 was in more than 12,000 feet of water. Once the site was found (after what, 2 years?) a great deal of information was gleaned from what the were able to obtain and examine with a variety of technology.
Air France (with the French Navy) searched for nearly two years for the AF 447 wreckage. In April 2011, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Cape Cod, Massachusetts) arrived on the scene and located the AF 447 aircraft in about a week using Waitt Institute vehicles. You may recall that WHOI was also the organization that located the Titanic back in the 1980s.
Locating and recovering the flight recorders was another matter. The French government hired Phoenix International (Largo, Maryland) to do this. Using Remora 6000 vehicles operated from a French chartered ship, Phoenix found and recovered the flight recorders within a week of arriving at the site in April 2011. The flight data recorder's memory unit was no longer inside the flight recorder's orange housing and had to be located and retrieved separately from the sea floor.
Hopefully this search in the Med will be far less challenging than the mid-Atlantic, and there are no severe terrain challenges and mid ocean mountain ranges to overcome. The pingers may even still be pinging, which would be a terrific advantage. However if the local search authorities cannot find the wreckage in a timely matter, it would benefit all to bring in the experts who have a track record at finding and recovering aircraft and flight recorders from the bottom of the sea.