The French air accident investigation agency says a $15 million search effort has failed to find the remains of Air France Flight 447, a year after it crashed in the depths of the Atlantic.Alain Guilldou of the BEA investigation agency said Tuesday that the search ended Monday. He said "it did not allow us to locate the wreckage of the airplane." The BEA is not commenting further on the search, or on whether there could be another search effort at a later date.

 

The renewed search effort began in March. Following the end of the search for bodies, the search for the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, the "black boxes", continued with the French nuclear submarine and with two French-contracted ships (towing the US Navy listening devices) trawling a search area with a radius of 80 kilometres (50 mi). However, by mid July, recovery of the black boxes had still not been announced. French search teams have denied an earlier report that a "very weak" signal had been picked up from the black box locator beacon.  The finite beacon battery life meant that, as the time since the crash elapsed, the likelihood of location diminished. In late July, the search for the black boxes entered its second phase, with a French research vessel resuming the search using a towed sonar array. In July 2009, Airbus announced that they would fund an extended search for the aircraft's black boxes. This announcement came amidst their official backing to determine the root cause of the accident. The second phase of the search ended on 20 August without finding wreckage within a 75 km radius of the last position, as reported at 02:10.

 

On 6 May 2010, the French Minister of Defense reported that the cockpit voice recorders had been localized to a zone 5 km by 5 km, following analysis of the data recorded by the French submarine during the initial search conducted in mid-2009.

 

On 12 May 2010, it was reported that the search following the 6 May report of the possible location of the voice recorders had not led to any findings and that the search had resumed in a different area than the one identified by the French submarine.