[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/09/intv.irving.clive.art.jpg caption="Clive Irving tells CNN that new technologies could replace existing flight data recorders."]

24 victims from Air France Flight 447 have been pulled from the sea so far. The number one priority according to the Brazilian military is recovering the bodies, but searchers are also desperately looking for the flight data recorders before time runs out. The area they’re concentrating on is about the size of Nebraska, almost 80,000 square miles.

Clive Irving says the daunting task of finding the so-called black boxes should be a wake-up call for doing away with this “antiquated technology.” Irving is the editor of Condé Nast Traveler magazine and specializes in aviation reporting. He joined John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Tuesday.

John Roberts: Brazilian authorities released a photo of the vertical stabilizer from Air France 447. It was found yesterday. It’s eerily similar, if you remember, to American Airlines 587 where they pulled the entire vertical stabilizer out of Jamaica Bay.

Clive Irving: In fact, it looks just like a plastic model assembly kit where you clip the vertical stabilizer on the fuselage and if you pull it off…it's an extraordinarily clean break there.

Roberts: And the fact that it is a clean break and it seems to be pretty much intact, does that give you a thought as to how this plane may have come down?

Irving: I think I’d be very wary to make a connection between the two things. Remember, this is a composite, not a metal vertical stabilizer. So the whole physics of the thing and how it shears off might be very different to the circumstances of an all metal plane.

Roberts: With American Airlines Flight 587, the pilots over-corrected. They put too much pressure on it and it snapped right off. We know the weather was bad in the area this aircraft was flying through.

Irving: Well yes it was. It was very bad. But I think the wake-up call here is the most significant thing, is we had our eyes pointed to a completely new technology that we almost didn't realize was there because the only clues that we have so far since this crash came from the uploaded data, the 24 messages sent to the maintenance center at Air France. That's all we've got to go on at the moment.

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Today, an armada of ships is converging on an area about 400 miles northeast of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha. Some are carrying submersibles that can work miles underwater, all to start piecing together the disaster of Air France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean.

One expert said it could be the hardest recovery since the search to find the Titanic, which took decades. Underwater recovery expert John Perry Fish spoke to John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Wednesday.

John Roberts: What will searchers be looking for at this point in their operation? And what kind of topography of the ocean floor are they going to be searching in?

John Perry Fish: The searchers are going to be looking for a very important piece of equipment called a digital flight data recorder… These record many, many parameters of the flight, the aircraft, its attitude, even the amount of force that one of the pilots might put on a pedal. And it’s very important to find these in order to find out what happened to the flight. Attached to each of these data recorders is what we call a “pinger.”

It puts out an acoustic pulse once a second for 30 days as soon as it's submerged in the water and these contacts are joined by electrical forces. So it's important to find these. And they'll be looking for these in an area that's fairly deep, as deep as a couple of miles and also part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is a mountainous area that runs all the way from Iceland down into the South Atlantic.

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