法航447空難紀(jì)實：尋找消失的黑匣子

The disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines 777 plane with over 200 people on board brings back memories of Air France flight 447, which went missing over the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009.

近日搭載200多名乘客的馬來西亞航空波音777飛機失聯(lián)事件，不禁讓人回想起法航447空難，AF447于2009年6月在大西洋上空失事。

The Airbus A330 took off from Rio de Janeiro and was bound for Paris when it crashed, killing all 228 people on board。

空客A330型客機AF447是從里約熱內(nèi)盧飛往巴黎，飛機失事時228名乘客全部遇難。

The search for the aircraft began when the Air France Operations Coordination Centre alerted the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) that it had lost contact with the plane。

法航運營協(xié)調(diào)中心向法國民航安全調(diào)查分析局發(fā)出飛機失聯(lián)的警報后，飛機搜尋工作立刻開始。

A search began immediately, using air, naval, and underwater operations, including autonomous underwater vehicles。

結(jié)合航測、海軍和使用自主水下航行器、水下探測等方式的綜合搜尋迅速展開。

The first bits of debris were found on the ocean surface on June 6, five days after the crash. The bulk of the wreckage was located in April 2011, nearly two years later. The "black boxes" — the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder — were found a month after that. Only then could investigators form a complete picture of what brought down the plane。

6月6日，即搜尋開啟5天后，在海洋表面發(fā)現(xiàn)了第一個飛機殘骸。在幾乎兩年后的2011年4月，大塊殘骸被發(fā)現(xiàn)，自此一個月后放在駕駛員座艙的錄音機及飛行數(shù)據(jù)記錄器“黑匣子”才被找到。這時調(diào)查者才能夠完整地分析出飛機失事原因。

The problem was that the jet crashed, the BEA final report says, "in a region with rugged terrain and whose ocean bed presents great variation in depth over short distances of between 700 metres and 4,300 metres."

法國民航安全調(diào)查分析局的最終報告稱，問題在于飛機失事發(fā)生在“一個地形崎嶇、海底短距離間深度差異巨大的地方(700到4300米深不等)”。

In other words, it was a remarkably difficult area to search. Most of the wreckage was eventually found 6.5 nautical miles from the last known position, on a plain 3,900 meters below the surface。

換句話說，這是一個非常難以搜尋的地方。大部分殘骸最終在離有記錄地區(qū)6.5海里的地方被找到，那里是距海平面3900米的海底平原。

So far, no wreckage from the Malaysia plane has been found, though a Vietnamese air force aircraft located two large oil slicks that may be from the missing plane. The aerial search will resume once the sun has risen. Fortunately, the Gulf of Thailand is just 250 feet deep at its deepest point, according to airline analyst Robert W. Mann, Jr., so the search should be much shorter than the Air France one。

盡管一架越南空軍飛機檢測到可能是失事馬航泄露出的漏油帶，但截至目前馬航殘骸尚未被找到，白天空中搜尋會繼續(xù)進行。據(jù)航空分析師羅伯特所說，幸運的是泰國灣最深水域250英尺(約76米)，所以馬航的搜尋時間要少很多。

nvestigators ultimately determined that the Air France flight went down after the pilots reacted improperly after ice crystals blocked air speed sensors. They ultimately stalled the plane, causing the crash。

調(diào)查者最終斷定，法航447飛行員在冰晶阻塞空氣速度傳感器后操作失誤，導(dǎo)致飛機速度失控遇難。

There's no reason to think that the same thing happened here, because we have no information about what happened to the Malaysia jet, and officials say there were no reports of bad weather along the route. A crucial step in figuring that out will be finding the wreckage and the black boxes。

在這里我們沒理由類比法航失聯(lián)，因為馬航MH370究竟發(fā)生了什么我們無從知曉，官方稱飛機航線無惡劣天氣。查明真相的關(guān)鍵在于找到飛機殘骸和黑匣子。