法航447空难纪实：消失的法航447

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.
近日搭载200多名乘客的马来西亚航空波音777飞机失联事件，不禁让人回想起法航447空难，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型客机AF447是从里约热内卢飞往巴黎，飞机失事机上的228人（216名乘客以及12名机组人员）全部遇难。

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.
法航运营协调中心向法国民航安全调查分析局发出飞机失联的警报后，飞机搜寻工作立刻开始。

A search began immediately, using air, naval, and underwater operations, including autonomous underwater vehicles.
结合航测、海军和使用自主水下航行器、水下探测等方式的综合搜寻迅速展开。

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，即搜寻开启5天后，在海洋表面发现了第一个飞机残骸。在将近两年后的2011年4月，大块残骸才被发现，自此一个月后放在驾驶员座舱的录音机及飞行数据记录器“黑匣子”才被找到。这时调查者才能够完整地分析出飞机失事原因。

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."
法国民航安全调查分析局的最终报告称，问题在于飞机失事位置为“一个地形崎岖、海底短距离间深度差异巨大的区域（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.
换句话说，这是一个非常难以搜寻的地方。大部分残骸最终在离有记录地区6.5海里的地方被找到，为距海平面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.
尽管一架越南空军飞机检测到可能是失事马航泄露出的漏油带，但截至目前马航残骸尚未被找到，白天空中搜寻会继续进行。据航空分析师罗伯特所说，幸运的是泰国湾最深水域250英尺（约76米），所以马航的搜寻时间要少很多。

Investigators 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.
调查者最终断定，法航447飞行员在冰晶阻塞空气速度传感器后操作失误，导致飞机速度失控遇难。

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.
在这里我们没理由类比法航失联，因为马航MH370究竟发生了什么我们无从知晓，官方称飞机航线无恶劣天气。查明真相的关键在于找到飞机残骸和黑匣子。