Imitates Intricate Drum Solo
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.
December 14th, 2009 at 7:54 am
So there is a book called “Stiff” by Mary Roach that answers things about bodies and plane crashes. It says that corpses float to the surface when the plane breaks apart, so I’m thinking that if they haven’t found the bodies already, they aren’t going to find them.
The book also has a ton of other interesting information about what happens to passengers in plane crashes, if you’re interested.
I think I read somewhere that bodies dissolve pretty quickly in the ocean, that’s why there weren’t any found on the Titanic. I doubt they’re going to find the plane crash bodies 7,000 feet down, but I could be wrong.
December 14th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
If you’re lucky they could be in a deepwater zone where there’s no oxygen, in which case they might be preserved. But yeah, if the plane broke apart, they’d all float up anyway.
Frankly, I think the whole “decent burial” thing is overrated. If I get killed in some giant mechanical shitstorm of any kind, for fuck’s sake don’t waste tons of money getting my body back just to put it somewhere else. I’m dead and gone, and the cash could be used instead to save lives, not corpses. (Not to mention the risk of more deaths amongst the searchers involved in most extreme recovery missions…)
December 15th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Will, your ’save lives, not corpses’ quote is excellent, and I will probably try to pass it off as my own the next time I have a conversation relating to body decomposition.
Altho, I suppose it is worth looking one last time with the robot submarine thingees, the families will still be anxious to say goodbye ‘properly’. I suppose. I would say it is unlikely they will find ‘much’.
I have your money TPD. You know where I am when you want it.
December 16th, 2009 at 8:11 am
Why would the bodies float to the surface? Shouldn’t they all have been wearing their seatbelts? I’m not sure I’d want to retrieve a partially decomposed, waterlogged body that’s been under a lot of pressure with which to remember a family member. Won’t be pretty.
Why don’t they make black boxes with flotation devices though?