A new search has begun for Air France flight 447 after it disappeared from radar over the Atlantic in June of 2009.

The new effort marks the fourth occasion in which workers have attempted to find the wreckage of the flight since it took off from Rio de Janerio on the nearly two years ago. Rescuers hope to recover the flight’s ‘black box’ flight recorders to help establish what had caused the Airbus A330 to go down. All 228 passengers and crew on board were killed.

The effort will be led by the BEA, the French government’s accident investigation authority, which said via its website that a vessel carrying specialised underwater robots had departed from the Brazilian port city of Recife on Tuesday. The team will utilise the robots to search the mountainous sea floor in the area where the flight had disappeared.

The search will also employ experts from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a US-based agency whose researchers have been given “operational responsibility” in the new effort. Workers will have a target search area spanning some 3,900 sq miles (10,000 sq km) and may last in excess of two months.