Hic Sunt Dracones

Briefly: So they’re going to resume searching for the Air France Flight 447 black box in Feb next year, and that seems really hard core. It’s presumably about 7000m underwater in the middle of the Atlantic and it will have stopped sending out signals by now. (30 days from activation, oh and also, apparently operates to just over 6K down, so that’s a bit unlucky too (seem to be diffrering accounts of the assumed depth of wreckage, 6K or 7K, either way, a long way down)) When they were first searching they had a hopefully live signal and they had a nuclear sub and an Orion and assorted other things looking, and they didn’t find it? If they find it now, using only passive means they are crazy awesome.

But what I was more interested in the Beeb’s article was:

Maarten Van Sluys, one of the relatives [said] it was important to remember that 178 bodies had yet to be recovered. He said: “We have expectations of recovering these remains and giving them a dignified burial.”

Now I hope that I’m never in the situation of wanting anyone that I love recovered in this way, but by the time the search resumes it will have been around nine months since the plane went down. I don’t know how long a body takes to decompose in the ocean, but surely nine months in the ocean is enough? Unless this is one of those situations where being seven kilometers below the surface helps protect the body, through the cold or something? But I’m not thinking they’re going to find much – unless they can find a big chunk of the plane, hopefully with something that will allow the families to bury.

OK this is making me come off as more than a cock than normal, I’m just saying, I wouldn’t hold out hope, because it seems like a long time. I can’t answer this question to my satisfaction as Google is being a bit vague on the time-line for body decomposition in salt water. Although I found this interesting Salon article on a Body Farm.

Oh yeah, and it seems vaguely important that we all take note that Blackwater renamed itself Xe (ya know, after the currency conversion website)

PS. The idea of them becoming a division of the CIA is horrifying, and enough for me to go looking for my tinfoil fedora.