Robot Locates Wreckage of Air-India Jet

Operators of an underwater robot said it located wreckage Friday on the Atlantic floor that is believed to contain the flight recorders of the Air-India jet that crashed off Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard.

Neville Hunter, a spokesman for the Cable and Wireless Telecommunications Co., said his firm will recover the wreckage as soon as Indian and Canadian authorities give permission.

The Boeing 747 vanished from radar screens June 23 on a flight from Canada to India via London before the pilot could radio a distress call, leading to speculation there was an explosion aboard.

Site of ‘Black Boxes’

Based on engineering drawings of the jumbo jet, Cable and Wireless specialists believe the “black box” flight recorders are in a tail panel found at a depth of over a mile about 100 miles southwest of Ireland, Hunter said.

The recorders could provide clues to whether an explosion caused the crash. There have been suspicions that a terrorist bomb was responsible.

The tail panel was found among wreckage scattered over a three-mile-long path of the seabed, Hunter said.

Could Be Hauled Up

“It could be recovered if we receive instructions from the Indian and Canadian authorities,” he said. The underwater robot, named Scarab, could attach lines to the tail panel so that the mother ship could haul the panel up.

Boeing 747s carry two flight recorders. One stores information from the aircraft’s instruments showing the direction, altitude and engine readings, and the other records voices and sounds in the cockpit.

Hunter said he did not know if the tail piece that has been located would normally contain one or both recorders.

Eight Cable and Wireless engineers operated the robot from aboard the French cable-laying vessel Leon Thevenin, Hunter said, monitoring its movements with a television screen on deck.

10 Large Pieces Located

A statement from the firm earlier Friday said the robot had located at least 10 large pieces of wreckage and the ocean floor in the area was “hard, flat and firm,” making it relatively easy to retrieve wreckage.

Indian news agencies reported Thursday that Indian investigators who studied wreckage and bodies from the plane believed an explosion occurred in a cargo container.

The British Broadcasting Corp. reported, however, that experts had found no trace of explosives in the wreckage retrieved and were questioning the bomb theory.