On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed several hundred miles off the northeastern coast of Brazil and landed deep in the ocean on some of the most rugged seafloor terrain on Earth.
Air France Flight 447 travel path
Map shows the approximate flight path of the ill-fated Air France Flight 447. (Illustration by Amy Caracappa-Qubeck, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
On April 4, 2011, a search team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) located the wreckage of the Airbus jet some 3,900 meters (nearly 2.5 miles) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
Slideshow
Search for Air France Flight 447
Three REMUS AUVs like this one (two owned by the Waitt Institute for Discovery and one from Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR of Germany) participitated in the search for the wreckage of Air France Flight 447.
Only after locating the airplane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders and analyzing the wreckage itself could investigators with the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) sufficiently answer questions related to the cause of the crash and help avoid a similar disaster in the future.
Ocean Robots: Air France Flight 447
To solve the mystery of Air France Flight 447, researchers turned to REMUS 6000 to search the rugged seafloor of the mid-ocean ridge.
References
REMUS 6000
Used to find and identify the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 more than 2 miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
What Happened to Air France Flight 447?
May 4, 2011—New York Times Magazine
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