Time’s up on finding Air France black box

French investigators say that Air France‘s Flight 447 did not break apart in the air, as was thought early on in the investigation. It slammed full force into the ocean and broke apart June 1, off Brazil’s northern coast. All 228 passengers on the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were killed, making the crash the deadliest in Air France’s history.

Investigators came to the conclusion the Airbus A330 aircraft was intact at the point of impact by examining the wreckage gathered from a wide area in the Atlantic Ocean. But they still don’t know what made Flight 447 crash. They need the plane’s black box (its digital flight recorder) to know for sure, and it’s at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

And now it’s too late. That’s because the black box (a misnomer as it is actually bright orange), which contains important information about the speed, altitude, and pilot communication, only emits locator signals for about 30 days after a crash. The 30-day mark was July 1. French investigators are cutting off the search for the black box on July 10 — when everyone agrees the black box’s batteries will have surely died.

Even the mini-submarine used to explore the ill-fated Titanic hasn’t turned up the black box. Weak signals were detected in June and investigators dispatched the Nautile. The mini-sub will continued to comb the ocean floor using sonar detection methods until mid-August — just in case.

Flight 447 vanished off the coast of Brazil May 31 after flying into violent thunderstorms. A flurry of automatic messages were sent from the plane before its disappearance and show that multiple system failures occurred. Search teams have found the bodies of 51 of Flight 447′s 228 passengers, including the plane’s captain.

It seems obvious it’s time to re-think the black box; not whether it should exist but rather how it should exist. Maybe it should be a “virtual” black box — one that sends the info to a computer on the ground — so that no one has to launch a very costly deep-sea expedition to find it. People say the technology exists.

Now investigators have another perplexing question on their hands: Can they solve the crash without the black box?