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The retrieval of two Air France flight recorders from the Atlantic renders the needles and haystacks cliche woefully inadequate
The resolution of one long hunt is dominating the news, but by any objective criterion another deserves some exposure too. The "uncovering" of Bin Laden's compound, with its 12-18 foot walls, hardly justifies the cliche about needles and haystacks. By contrast, the same analogy is woefully inadequate for the parallel search operation to retrieve two Air France black boxes from the bottom of the Atlantic. The flight recorders took up perhaps one part in every 1020 of that ocean's watery vastness. You thus need a number with 21 digits to put things in mathematical perspective, which – from any human perspective – means the recorders simply drop out of view. But since the French flag carrier's worst crash cost 228 lives in 2009, the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses has slogged for 23 months, and through savvy deployment of submarinal robots with manipulator arms, it has now made its double retrieval from the deep. The vanishing of flight AF447 was shrouded in obscurity but, if the boxes dry out as hoped, the first will reveal precisely where things went wrong, and the second, which recorded the crew as the catastrophe hit, could even reveal why. Was there a problem with the hardware's design, or merely the way it was used? This is a question of pressing legal and practical importance. The boxes, which despite the name are painted orange to make them conspicuous, offer the bereaved a chance of the truth, and give all air travellers the hope that lessons will be learned.
