Resumption of the search for the flight recorders from crashed Air France flight AF447 has been delayed, but French investigators expect a US detection vessel to arrive in Brazil next week.
The Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses states that the vessel, the Anne Candies, is predicted to reach Recife around 24 March.
Its departure for the scene had been held up by "administrative and technical difficulties", says the BEA, as well as poor weather conditions.
Recovery teams are planning to use deep-water search equipment in a bid to find the wreckage of the Airbus A330 which came down in the South Atlantic on 1 June last year.
Anne Candies is equipped with a dual-frequency towed side-scan sonar, capable of deep-water searches to a depth of 20,000ft (6,100m).
Its operator, Phoenix International, says the equipment can be used to trace a swath with a typical width of 1.8km when hunting for aircraft debris fields.
The vessel also carries a 2.9t cable-controlled underwater recovery vehicle, known as CURV-21.
Anne Candies is set to rendezvous with a second ship, the Seabed Worker, to which it will transfer equipment. The BEA has yet to set a formal date to resume the search. The latest effort will be the third attempt to locate the A330's flight recorders.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
