Search for the Wreckage of Air France Flight AF 447

TL;DR

This paper describes a Bayesian approach to locate the wreckage of Air France Flight AF 447, successfully guiding the search that ultimately found the wreckage after two years of unsuccessful efforts.

Contribution

The paper introduces a Bayesian methodology for search planning that integrates all available information to efficiently locate missing aircraft wreckage.

Findings

Wreckage was found within a week of the third search phase.

Bayesian analysis effectively combined prior information and search data.

The approach improved search efficiency over previous methods.

Abstract

In the early morning hours of June 1, 2009, during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, Air France Flight AF 447 disappeared during stormy weather over a remote part of the Atlantic carrying 228 passengers and crew to their deaths. After two years of unsuccessful search, the authors were asked by the French Bureau d'Enqu\^{e}tes et d'Analyses pour la s\'{e}curit\'{e} de l'aviation to develop a probability distribution for the location of the wreckage that accounted for all information about the crash location as well as for previous search efforts. We used a Bayesian procedure developed for search planning to produce the posterior target location distribution. This distribution was used to guide the search in the third year, and the wreckage was found with one week of undersea search. In this paper we discuss why Bayesian analysis is ideally suited to solving this problem, review previous non-Bayesian efforts, and describe the methodology used to produce the posterior probability distribution for the location of the wreck.