Crash investigation
July 11, 2009
A spokeswoman for the BEA, the French office in charge of the investigation into the crash, said French submarines would continue to look for the flight recorders, but that no further efforts would be made to pick up their remote signals.
The black boxes, which could be in waters as deep as 3,500 meters, are designed to give off signals for some thirty days following a crash and experts believe that threshold was reached on Friday.
The BEA says a second phase of the investigation, scheduled to go on until August 20, will get underway early next week when French submarines and a robot craft begin a systematic search of the ocean floor.
Last month, the Brazilian military called off its search for bodies and debris from the ill-fated Airbus, which they found scatterered across a vast area of the sea.
Without the black boxes, which record flight data and voices and sounds in the cockpit, investigators cannot be sure exactly what went wrong on flight AF447. But speculation has centered around faulty speed sensors.
tkw/AFP/dpa
Editor: Kyle James