An extraordinary mission for safety of air travel

On 1^st June 2009, an Air France aircraft flying from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris, and carrying 216 passengers and 12 crewmen disappeared over the Atlantic. After close to two years of intense search, the debris of this aircraft are believed to have been found, more than 12800 feet under the sea. Read the extraordinary story here, don't miss it.

Investigators will now try to recover the flight recorders, lying at a place “.....here the sea is perfectly black, temperatures approach freezing and water pressure is equal to the weight of a car on a postage stamp......”. Hardly anyone has gone to such depths before, and the challenges the investigators face include “.....the presence of numerous bodies, some still strapped into their seats and preserved by the cold water and lack of oxygen or light.....”. Will the investigators bring up only the flight recorders, or also the bodies and hand them over to their relatives? Heart wrenching scenes would result, old wounds would be uncovered.

Read the full history of flight AF447 here.

Why are the investigators doing all this? Their mission is to establish the cause of the crash and make future air travel safer.

Air travel is becoming safer in India too. Read our contribution to this here, or here.