It was a miracle that they even located the flight recorder and now it may require another miracle. After sitting at the bottom of the ocean, the recorder is likely to have experienced damage from salt water. If the circuit board has been damahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifged, it is still possible to read the chips though they will have to be read individually.
Figuring out what caused this flight to go down is important for everyone who flies. Bloomberg:
The recorders, one storing flight data and the other cockpit voices and sounds, house several dozen memory chips that may provide clues to modern aviation’s biggest unsolved mystery. The challenge will be to render the material readable after the boxes spent two years at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, exposed to corrosive salt water and intense pressure.
“We have no experience in dealing with flight recorders that have been immersed at this kind of depth, so we just don’t know,” said Philippe Plantin de Hugues, a black-box expert with France’s BEA air-accident investigation bureau in Paris.
