Navy Uses Robots To Find Black Box

PORT HUENEME, Calif. (AP) - The Navy is relying on underwater robots to search for the ``black boxes'' from Alaska Airlines Flight 261, resting some 700 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific.

The Navy's deep sea teams recorded a quick success Wednesday when they retrieved the plane's cockpit voice recorder and hoisted it to the deck of the salvage vessel Kellie Chouest just hours after launching the salvage operation. Investigators hope the recorder contains tape of conversations between crew members, air traffic controllers and other sounds in the cockpit.

The plane crashed Monday, killing all 88 people aboard. The crash site is about 10 miles from shore.

Still missing is the plane's flight data recorder, which details the plane's mechanical operation. The unmanned submersible Scorpio 1 was expected to investigate pinging sounds detected in the debris zone.

The 4,500-pound, battery-powered Scorpio I is tethered to the Kellie Chouest by a cord that allows guidance by a shipboard operator. The operator uses a video camera mounted on the robot to scan the ocean floor.

About the size of a minivan, the submersible can find and recover objects 5,000 feet below the surface.

``In a search, we develop a picture of the scene, primarily using the video cameras and sonar,'' said Lt. Christy Sheaff, spokeswoman for the Pacific Submarine Force. ``Once we have a clear picture of where things are ... the Scorpio is reconfigured for recovery.''

The 310-foot Kellie Chouest is part of a four-ship flotilla carrying nearly 1,000 people taking part in the recovery effort. It is the same Coronado-based ship that in December recovered the bodies of seven Marines who died during the crash of a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter off San Diego.

The Navy team running the operation also handled last year's crashes of an EgyptAir jet and the plane carrying John F. Kennedy Jr. and his relatives.

The Alaska Airlines wreckage is beyond the 300-foot limit for divers, but the Navy has previously gone as deep as 9,000 feet, said Capt. Bert Marsh, supervisor of the Naval Systems Command.

Still, he cautioned retrieval could take days or weeks.

``This is not out of our realm,'' Marsh said. ``You can't do it overnight. You have to be methodical.''

Two more turtle-shaped robots - each about the size of a small car - have been dispatched to the site.

Submersibles have become invaluable tools since the first ones were developed 30 years ago to fetch torpedoes for the Navy from ocean test ranges. They have become invaluable tools on the sea bottom, from retrieving sunken debris to fixing underwater telephone cables.

They have also become valuable to scientists mapping the ocean floor and historians studying long-sunken wreckage.

In 1987, an underwater robot studied the wreck of the USS Monitor, the Union Army's Civil War ironclad that sunk 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, N.C. Another snapped the first pictures of the Titanic in 13,000 feet of water in 1985, 73 years after it sank off the coast of Newfoundland.

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