Having watched the NOVA episode, it'll be very interesting to see if this data can confirm their suspicions.

"French search teams last week found the outer casing of the so-called black box recorder, but not its memory."

(EDIT: This is incorrect, sorry. The article is poorly worded. Would you rather I delete this comment?)

...And they just found the memory unit (which is designed to detach from the recorder in the event of a collision) today. A picture of the actual memory unit in question: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/01/world/europe/01...

Ahhh. Thank you for clarifying the article. That's amazing!

Indeed. Looking for the proverbial needle in a huge haystack is a piece of cake compared to what was done there.

IIRC, they actually had some very low level signal from the recorders two years ago that they didn't actually take notice of, and later, working on this data they finally extrapolated the probable position of the wreck after a tremendous data mining work.

Whoa. If you can find any links whatsoever about that, then I'd love to read them.

That reminds me of how Gauss was able to use very limited information to locate Ceres after it had moved behind the sun.

It's been quite hard to find information about the re-analysis. It looks like there was a press-release in May last year where the pingers were identified after a re-analysis of the Emeraude towed-array sonar tapes:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/air-france-crash...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/europe/07crash.html?...

Sadly, there are no references to source material, and a quick search through the BEA at http://www.bea.aero/ (the French aviation accident investigation agency) didn't provide immediate satisfaction, alas.

Now I remember that actually a friend working in the French submarine industry talked me about this. I don't know if I've got any other source.

"we're sorry but this video is not available in your area due to rights restrictions". There's money to be made from everything.