Ok, now I am not trying to bash up the French here... There are plenty of sites that take care of that far better than I could, or want to... This just happened to catch my eye, and just made me confused, and somewhat angry...
Last weekend, a charter jet, carrying mostly French passengers crashed into the Red Sea after taking off from a resort city in Egypt. So in an effort to help out, the French sent some navel assets and personel to help in recovery efforts... So far they're doing great right?... Well somebody in the French navy did whatever they had to do, and figured the black boxs were down at a depth of 600-800 meters... I'm not going to figure out how they can tell that, but apparently they can... So they fowarded a request for diving equipment (most likely unmanned) that can get down to those depths to the French government... They're still doing great, but wait for it... The French government sent out equipment that can only handle 400 meters... Ok, there it is... Why the hell bother folks?... Equipment that can go down to this depth is certianlly not unheard of... The Titanic is down at 12,460 feet, that's 3798 meters... Subs and remote veihicles go down there and salvage little bits and peices to put on display in museums, how the hell do the French justify not getting propper equipment to Egypt to pull the black boxes up?... Ok, perhaps the French don't have the equipment, I can accept that, though I doubt it... The Russians managed to swallow their pride enough to get two Dutch salvage companies to lift a nuclear submarine for them... I suspect someone would be willing to get the right gear out to the Red Sea if the French asked for help... I am disgusted by the French governments lack of concern to do the job once they got involved... Did they just want to be the good guys if it wasn't too difficult?...
Here is the CNN page that set me off on this...
Ok... I'm done now... They make me sick with this...
Posted by Backstage at January 6, 2004 05:36 PM