This July, aviation officials released their final report on one of the most puzzling and grim episodes in French aviation history: the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The plane had mysteriously plummeted from an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet for three and a half minutes, before colliding explosively with the vast, two-mile-deep waters of the south Atlantic. Two hundred and twenty eight people lost their lives; it took almost two years, and the help of robotic probes from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to even find the wreckage. The sea had swallowed them whole.