PARIS - The French agency probing the mid-Atlantic crash of an Air France jet said Thursday it would release an initial report on its findings on July 2.
The Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA) leading the technical inquiry into the June 1 crash said it would present the report at a press conference at its headquarters in the Paris suburbs.
Flight AF 447 went down around 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) off Brazil's northeast coast as it was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board.
The cause of the disaster is not known. Speculation has swirled about whether the plane broke up in the air, perhaps from strong turbulence, or on hitting the water.
Air France said earlier that the plane's pilot and one of its stewards have been identified among the bodies pulled out of the sea.
Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau told the French Senate on Thursday that 51 bodies had been recovered so far.
PARIS: A French mini-submarine has been launched after a "very weak" signal was detected from the flight recorders of the Air France jetliner that crashed in the Atlantic, Le Monde reported Tuesday.
But the French bureau investigating the crash said the black boxes of Flight 447 had not been found and that research teams "check out any sound" that might lead to them.
The Nautile submersible set out on Monday after French navy vessels detected a "very weak signal" several hundred kilometres off the coast of Brazil, Le Monde reported on its website. No source was quoted in the report.
Owned by Ifremer, the French oceans research institute, the Nautile is capable of operating at a depth of six kilometres (3.7 miles) and was used by research teams who explored the wreck of the Titanic.
"No flight recorders have been located to this day," said a spokeswoman for the BEA aviation investigating bureau.
"This is not the first time that we have heard noise. We check out all of these noises. The research effort continues," she said.
The homing beacons on the devices will only operate for around another week.
"I have no confirmation for the time being" that the flight-data recorders have been found, said Captain Christophe Prazuck, spokesman for the army general staff.
The Air France Airbus A330 carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris came down in the Atlantic on June 1. The cause of the disaster has not been established.
Fifty bodies have been recovered from the crash zone, along with hundreds of pieces of the plane.
The Nautile was taken to the debris zone on board the French maritime research vessel Pourquoi Pas and was to be deployed once the ping from the black boxes was detected.
Other than the Pourquoi Pas, the French nuclear submarine Emeraude and two high-sea vessels equipped with sonars are taking part in the deep-sea search for the vital data and voice recorders of Flight 447.
The boxes - in reality bright orange - would help investigators piece together the final minutes of the ill-fated flight that went down during a storm as it was flying through turbulence.
No distress call was received from the pilots, but there was a series of 24 automated messages sent by the plane in the final minutes of the doomed flight.
French investigators probing the crash have said that the airspeed sensors, or pitot probes, had been feeding inconsistent readings to the cockpit.
Conflicting airspeed data can cause the autopilot to shut down and in extreme cases the plane to stall or fly dangerously fast, possibly causing a high-altitude breakup.
But the BEA, along with Airbus and Air France, have said there is as yet no firm evidence linking the speed monitors and the crash of the jetliner.
Air France has upgraded all sensors on its long-haul fleet as precautionary measure after protests from pilots.
The crash was the worst in Air France's 75-year history.
SAO PAULO: Eleven of the 50 bodies recovered from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic three weeks ago have been identified by fingerprints and dental records, Brazilian officials said on Sunday.
The bodies were identified as "10 Brazilians and one foreigner," officials in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco said in a statement.
Five of the Brazilians were male, the other five were female and the foreigner was male, it added.
The officials, part of a task force that also includes Brazilian police and forensic specialists conducting autopsies in the city of Recife, did not give further details about those identified.
They said the families of the identified Brazilians had been visited personally on Friday and Saturday by police officers who broke the news.
The embassy of the foreigner who was identified was also notified.
A special morgue in Recife has received 49 of the 50 bodies recovered from the crash site 1,000 kilometres off Brazil's northeast coast. The 50th body was due to be delivered by ship on Monday.
There were 228 people from 32 countries onboard the airliner, which went down June 1 off the coast of Brazil on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The cause of the disaster - the worst in Air France's history - was not known.
Seventy-two French citizens, 59 Brazilians, 26 Germans and passengers from 29 other countries were on the flight.
Identification was initially being attempted using fingerprints, scars, surgical or dental characteristics, and tattoos on the bodies.
If those failed, DNA tests were to be carried out in a Brazilian police laboratory in Brasilia based on samples taken from relatives.
After bodies were identified, they were to be released to the families for burial, the statement said.
The Brazilian officials said they were still waiting for records and other information to identify bodies of foreigners.
"The lack of pre-mortem data explains the small number foreigners identified," they said in the statement.
Brazilian authorities leading the search for bodies and debris have fading hopes of finding any more remains. On Saturday, a sophisticated plane with on-board radar that found the first traces of the downed plane was taken off the operation.
A separate French operation looking for the plane's black boxes was continuing, with a French military nuclear submarine scouring the crash zone.
It was trying to detect homing beacons that are expected to fade within a week. - AFP/de
Bodies had fractures to arms, legs, hips, and few had clothing, French official says
Condition of bodies points to mid-air rupture of Air France flight, experts say
Brazilian medical examiners gave information about bodies to French investigators
French Senator Gerard Larcher throws a tribute wreath into waters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Thursday.
PARIS, France (CNN) -- At least some of the bodies recovered from the Air France crash this month had broken bones, Brazilian authorities have told French investigators, evidence that suggests the flight broke apart before hitting the ocean.
Paul-Louis Arslanian, director of the Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, the French accident investigation board, said Thursday that Brazilian medical examiners had given that information to his agency.
Asked whether the information included reports that the recovered bodies from Flight 447 had fractures to arms, legs and hips, and few had any clothing, Arslanian said yes.
All of that, aviation experts have said, points to a mid-air rupture of the plane at about 35,000 feet.
There is still no explanation of what brought down the Airbus A330, which was en route from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France when it crashed in the Atlantic on June 1.
Arslanian pleaded Thursday for the media and the public to stop speculation about the cause of the Air France crash.
A Brazilian diver floats on wreckage of Flight 447 spotted Wednesday.
A major Brazilian newspaper reported this week that 95 percent of the bodies so far had shown fractures in the legs, arms and hips similar to injuries found in people who fall from great heights. The newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo cited unnamed officials who are part of the investigation.
Another clue is the low incidence of cranial trauma, the newspaper reported. If the aircraft had nose-dived into the ocean, victims would have more head injuries, the paper said.
A large number of bodies also had red lesions in their mucous membranes, which the paper said is usually associated with asphyxia, or lack of oxygen.
Another major Brazilian newspaper, the Jornal do Brasil, cited information from an unnamed person from the Brazilian military who has access to the teams working in the recovery of the plane. This person told the paper that bodies were found "mutilated" with no clothing, a strong indication of violent depressurization caused by a structural rupture.
Investigators are analyzing evidence, seeking clues, chief of French agency BEA says
Nature of damage to plane parts, injuries to victims may give clues, analyst says
Sensitive listening devices used to search for Air France Flight 447 data recorders
"It's as if it fell in the Andes," search mission leader says of jet that crashed in Atlantic
The tail fin of the Airbus A330 that crashed in the Atlantic is unloaded this week in Recife, Brazil.
PARIS, France (CNN) -- Investigators are "getting a little bit closer" to determining what caused an Air France airliner to disappear into the Atlantic Ocean, but there are no answers yet, a French investigator said Wednesday.
The Airbus A330 crashed June 1, killing all 228 people aboard. Fifty bodies and a few parts of the plane have been recovered. Searchers are especially interested in finding the aircraft's flight data recorder, assumed to be resting at the bottom of the ocean.
"I understand that the families [of the victims] want to know what happened," Paul-Louis Arslanian, director of the BEA, the French accident investigation board, said at a news conference in Paris.
"The only message I can give them is that at the moment ... we are working as quickly and intensely as possible in order to one day find out what happened and what we may do in order to make aviation safer."
It is "virtually certain" that authorities will not be able to recover all the parts of the plane, Arslanian admitted.
The exact location of the crash is not known because the plane was not within any controller's radar when it disappeared, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders have not been recovered, and ocean currents have moved the bodies and debris that have been found.
A large number of French, Brazilian and American ships are searching the waters, and the BEA has asked the European Space Agency to provide satellite imagery of the search area, said Olivier Ferrante, chief of the BEA search mission.
Investigators are looking at the possible role of airspeed sensors known as pitot tubes, among other factors, but Arslanian cautioned reporters not to speculate about what happened.
"It is far too early to imagine scenarios one way or another," he said.
Theories range from electrical failure caused by a lightning strike to terrorism.
"As an investigator, until you know exactly what caused it, you need to leave everything on the table," Capt. John Cox, a longtime pilot with expertise in global air safety, told CNN.
Foul play is possible, "but there's been nothing that shows me that it would be a prime suspect," he said.
Investigators on land have been studying the aircraft fragments that have been gathered, but Arslanian offered no information on their findings.
Investigators are likely to test for explosive residue, said CNN security analyst Mike Brooks, who as a member of an FBI response team has participated in air disaster investigations.
"If there was an explosion onboard, then super-heated gases would make little pinprick holes," and some of the bodies would have burns, Brooks said last week.
As for the bodies, Brazilian officials have conducted all the autopsies, and the French officials were not able to discuss the results.
"It's a very, very gruesome and arduous task, but they're going to have to look at mechanism of injuries," Brooks said. "How did these people die?"
The types of injuries the victims suffered will tell investigators a lot about what happened to the plane, he said.
But the focus for investigators and search teams in the Atlantic remains finding the plane's cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which send out an electronic signal for at least 30 days after a crash.
Searchers are using sensitive audio equipment to listen for the recorders' beacons, Ferrante said.
The mountainous ocean floor in the search area ranges from 3,280 to 15,091 feet, BEA officials said, making the search for the recorders -- and the rest of the plane's debris -- difficult.
"It is as if it fell in the Andes," the BEA's Ferrante said.
Even if the recorders are recovered, the mystery may not be solved, Arslanian cautioned.
"I cannot say to you that when we have them we will have everything, we will know everything," he said. "And I cannot say that if we don't have them, then the inquiry is stopped."
SAO PAULO - Autopsies have revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France disaster victims, injuries that _ coupled with the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic _ strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air, experts said Wednesday.
With more than 400 bits of debris recovered from the ocean's surface, the top French investigator expressed optimism about discovering what brought down Flight 447, but he also called the conditions _ far from land in very deep waters _ "one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation."
French investigators are beginning to form "an image that is progressively less fuzzy," Paul-Louis Arslanian, who runs the French air accident investigation agency BEA, told a news conference outside Paris.
"We are in a situation that is a bit more favorable than the first days," Arslanian said. "We can say there is a little less uncertainty, so there is a little more optimism. ... (but) it is premature for the time being to say what happened."
A spokesman for Brazilian medical examiners told The Associated Press on Wednesday that fractures were found in autopsies on an undisclosed number of the 50 bodies recovered so far. The official spoke on condition he not be named due to department rules.
"Typically, if you see intact bodies and multiple fractures _ arm, leg, hip fractures _ it's a good indicator of a midflight break up," said Frank Ciacco, a former forensic expert at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. "Especially if you're seeing large pieces of aircraft as well."
The pattern of fractures was first reported Wednesday by Brazil's O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, which cited unnamed investigators. The paper also reported that some victims were found with little or no clothing, and had no signs of burns.
That lack of clothing could be significant, said Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, D.C., who is a former accident investigator. "In an in-air break up like we are supposing here, the clothes are just torn away."
Casey also said multiple fractures are consistent with a midair breakup of the plane, which was cruising at about 34,500 feet (10,500 meters) when it went down.
"Getting ejected into that kind of windstream is like hitting a brick wall - even if they stay in their seats, it is a crushing effect," Casey said. "Most of them were long dead before they hit the water would be my guess."
When a jet crashes into water mostly intact _ such as the Egypt Air plane that hit the Atlantic Ocean after taking off from New York in 1999 _ debris and bodies are generally broken into small pieces, Ciacco said. "When you've had impact in the water, there is a lot more fragmentation of the bodies. They hit the water with a higher force."
Lack of burn evidence would not necessarily rule out an explosion, said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
If something caused the lower fuselage to burn or explode, "passengers would not be exposed to any blast damage" and the plane would still disintegrate in flight," Goglia said. "These are scenarios that cannot be ruled out."
Searchers from Brazil, France, the United States and other countries are methodically scanning the surface and depths of the Atlantic for signs of the Airbus A330 that crashed May 31 after running into thunderstorms en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 people aboard were killed.
Still missing are the plane's flight data and voice recorders, thought to be deep under water.
French-chartered ships are trolling a search area with a radius of 50 miles (80 kilometers), pulling U.S. Navy underwater listening devices attached to 19,700 feet (6,000 meters) of cable. The black boxes send out an electronic tapping sound that can be heard up to 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) away, but these locator beacons will begin to fade after just two more weeks.
U.S. Air Force Col. Willie Berges, commander of the American military forces supporting the search, said the black boxes emit beacons at a unique frequency, virtually guaranteeing that any signal detected would be from the pingers.
"The question becomes if the black box is with the pinger, because they can get separated," Berges said. "If a signal is located, the French would then send down a robotic vehicle that is in the area to look at it, confirm that it is the black box and bring it up."
Without the black boxes to help explain what went wrong, the investigation has focused on a flurry of automated messages sent by the plane minutes before it lost contact; one suggests external speed sensors had iced over, destabilizing the plane's control systems.
Arslanian said most of the messages appear to be "linked to this loss of validity of speed information." He said when the speed information became "incoherent" it affected other systems on the plane that relied on that speed data. But he stressed that not all the automated messages were related to the speed sensors.
The automated messages were not alarm calls and no distress call was picked up from the plane, he said.
Air France has replaced the sensors, called Pitot tubes, on all its A330 and A340 aircraft, under pressure from pilots who feared a link to the accident.
Arslanian said a French doctor from the BEA was not allowed to participate in autopsies done so far on some Flight 447 bodies by Brazilian authorities, and those autopsy results have not been released to the BEA. He said he was "not happy" with this situation.
However, he added that French judicial authorities, who are conducting a parallel criminal probe, were present at the autopsies.
Brazil's Federal Police and state medical authorities in Recife who are overseeing the autopsies said in a statement that two French investigators, a dental expert and a doctor, had been following the examinations as observers since June 10.
The French are leading the crash investigation, while the Brazilians are leading the rescue operation.
___
Vandore reported from Le Bourget, France. Associated Press writers Greg Keller in Le Bourget and Bradley Brooks in Rio de Janeiro also contributed to this report.
Divers from the Brazilian Navy recover a portion of the rudder of the missing Air France Flight 447. AFP
RIO DE JANEIRO - A burst of automatic messages sent by Air France Flight 447 before it crashed includes one about a problem with a rudder safety device but lacks decisive clues as to what sent the jet plunging into the Atlantic Ocean two weeks ago, an aviation expert said on Saturday.
The industry official, who has knowledge of the Air France investigation, told AP that a transcript of the messages posted on the website EuroCockpit is authentic but inconclusive.
One of the 24 automatic messages sent from the plane minutes before it disappeared on May 31 with 228 on board points to a problem in the "rudder limiter", a mechanism that limits how far the plane's rudder can move. The flight was headed from Rio de Janeiro to Paris through an area of fierce thunderstorms.
The nearly intact vertical stabiliser - which includes the rudder - was fished out of the water earlier this week by Brazilian searchers.
"There is a lot of information, but not many clues," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to discuss the matter.
The official said jets like the Airbus A330 that crashed automatically send such maintenance messages about once a minute during a plane's flight. They are used by the ground crew to make repairs once a plane lands. If the rudder were to move too far while travelling fast, it could shear off and take the vertical stabiliser with it, which some experts theorise may have happened based on the relatively limited damage to the stabiliser.
The industry official, however, said the error message pertaining to the rudder limiter did not indicate it malfunctioned, but rather that it had locked itself in place because of conflicting speed readings.
Investigators have focused on the possibility that external speed monitors - called Pitot tubes - iced over and gave false readings to the plane's computers.
"The message tells us that the rudder limiter was inoperative," Mr Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant, said last week. "It does not give you any reason why it is not working or what caused it, or
what came afterward."
Unless the flight data and black boxes are found, the exact cause of the accident may never be known. AP
Journalists look at debris of the missing Air France flight 447 after being recovered from the ocean.
RIO DE JANEIRO: The search for bodies and remnants of a lost Air France airliner enters its third and possibly final week on Monday with the focus now on locating the "black box" recorders that could hold the key to its plunge into the Atlantic.
The fate of flight AF 447, which vanished on the night of May 31 to June 1 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, has not been explained though data indicating the presence of defective speed sensors raised the first alerts of a crash.
But on Sunday, EADS, the mother company of the aircraft's builder Airbus, called for "prudence."
"It's the convergence of different causes that led to such an accident," said Louis Gallois, EADS president and chief executive, on the eve of the Paris air show at Bourget.
"We do not know whether the Pitot tubes (the sensors that measure airspeed) played a role in the accident. No one knows," Gallois said.
Air France and France's Bureau of Investigations and Analyses, BEA, which is in charge of the investigation, have also refused to link the crash to the Pitot sensors.
The company, however, has accelerated replacement of the sensors on its Airbus A330-A340 aircraft, under pressure from pilots and after several incidents in 2008 were linked to airspeed sensor malfunctions.
Airbus president Thomas Enders indicated that teams from the manufacturer were with BEA investigators in Brazil and on ships searching for debris from the aircraft.
As of Saturday night, the Brazilian and French navies had recovered 49 bodies as well as pieces of the aircraft, including a large fragment of its tail.
Most of the bodies have been transported to Recife, on Brazil's northeastern coast, where a team of doctors is examining them to establish their identities.
Laid out in an enormous hangar at the Recife air base, the pieces of the aircraft indicate that its descent was sudden and that it was not caused by an explosion on board, according to experts consulted by the Brazilian press.
These opinions are supported by a photograph that shows seats reserved for the crew folded up, suggesting that crew members were taken by surprise by the disaster.
Among the 228 victims were people of 32 nationalities, including 72 French nationals, 59 Brazilians and 26 Germans.
The French government's special emissary, Pierre-Jean Vandoorne, met with relatives of the victims Saturday in Rio de Janeiro.
"Their principal concern is to recover the bodies and understand the causes of the catastrophe," Vandoorne told AFP. He was scheduled to meet Sunday in Recife with the Brazilian military officials in charge of the search.
For the past two weeks, a French-Brazilian flotilla has been combing an enormous expanse of the high seas 1,350 kilometres from Recife.
However, even though sailors initially reported that they were navigating through "a sea of (aircraft) pieces," sightings of debris have become rare, possibly because they sink or are dispersed by the currents.
The Brazilian military has begun talking about an end to the search, with Brigadier Ramon Cardoso saying it will continue "at least until June 19." A reassessment will be made on June 17, he said.
Meanwhile, the search for the two "black boxes," which may be on the ocean floor at a depth of 3,500 metres, should intensify.
The French nuclear submarine "Emeraude" already has begun patrolling the area where the plane went down in hopes that its ultra-sensitive sonars will pick up signals emitted by the flight recorders.
Two other ships brought in by France are supposed to work with two "pinger locators," sonars installed on a kilometres-long cable supplied by the US military.
The French underwater exploration vessel "Pourquoi pas" also arrived in the area of the search with a submarine and a robot. - AFP/de
A partition with crew seats recovered with other wreckage
RECIFE, Brazil: Debris recovered so far from Air France flight 447 seems to indicate the jet plunged suddenly into the Atlantic Ocean and did not explode in the sky, Brazilian experts said Saturday.
Almost two weeks after the Rio-Paris flight disappeared at sea, former pilot Ari Germano told O Globo newspaper that he was "struck" by at least one of the photographs released Friday by the Brazilian Air Force.
According to Germano, who has written a book about air crashes, the images suggested that the Airbus A330 passengers were caught by surprise and the tragedy unfolded so rapidly that the crew did not have the time to react.
In the photographs, the seats in the crew area were folded with the seatbelts hanging down, which "suggests that the crew was moving about the passenger cabin. If there had been an alert or a warning about a pending risk, the crew would have been seated," he said.
"They did not have the time to do anything," added the former pilot, who also recognized an orange first aid kit that was left intact.
Dozens of pieces of debris recovered by the Brazilian Navy have been brought to an airport hangar in the northeastern city of Recife.
A French navy ship on Friday recovered six more bodies, bringing to 50 the number of bodies found in the wake of the crash of the plane, which went down over the ocean on the night from May 31 to June 1 with 228 people on board.
Captain Ronaldo Jenkins, a security consultant with the National Union of Air Carriers (SNEA), told Globo that he had identified a safety vest and part of the plane's internal covering, which showed no trace of fire or smoke, suggesting no explosion.
"On the photographs published in recent days, where we can see debris from the plane floating in the water and a restroom door, there were also no signs of fire," he added.
First bodies recovered from the crash of Air France 447 returned to land
Air France agrees to replace within days speed sensors, pilots' union says
Air France said it began replacing parts in April
The location of the crash has not been determined
Brazilian military personnel on Tuesday carry the remains of one of the passengers of the Air France crash.
FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil (CNN) -- Forty-one bodies have been recovered from the crash of Air France Flight 447, the Brazilian Navy Command and Aeronautical Command said Tuesday.
Sixteen bodies pulled from the Atlantic Ocean Tuesday were taken to Fernando de Noronha for transportation Wednesday afternoon by helicopter to the air base in Recife, Brazil.
The 25 bodies previously found were put aboard a Brazilian frigate.
Searches for the remaining bodies will continue overnight, the navy and aeronautical command said in a written statement.
The Airbus A330 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean June 1 en route from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, carrying 228 passengers and crew.
The first bodies were recovered about 320 kilometers (200 miles) northwest of the Brazilian archipelago of Saint Peter and Saint Paul; Tuesday's recoveries were 80 kilometers (50 miles) away. It was not clear whether the bodies had drifted in the 1-2 knot currents or whether their separation suggested that the jet may have broken apart in the air.
Recovery efforts have found several items confirmed to have come from Air France Flight 447.
Meanwhile, the French, who are leading the investigation, were increasing their naval efforts. The nuclear submarine Emeraude was expected to reach the search area Wednesday to search for wreckage, including the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. And the French sent two tugs towing 40 tons of recovery equipment, a surveillance ship and a ship equipped for amphibious operations.
The United States is also sending equipment to help with the search.
Brazilian authorities said the plane debris will be taken to France for investigation but the bodies would undergo forensic tests in Recife.
The cause of the crash is not known, but investigators are looking at the possible role of airspeed sensors known as Pitot tubes, among other factors.
A boat from the Brazilian navy picks up debris Sunday in the Atlantic Ocean. Recovery efforts continued Monday.
Air France has agreed to replace the sensors on its Airbus A330 and A340 jets, a pilots' union said Tuesday.
The airline said Saturday that it began replacing its fleet's sensors last month.
Another Air France pilots' union, ALTER, has advised its pilots not to fly planes until their Pitot tubes are replaced. ALTER, the smallest of three Air France pilots' unions, would not say what percentage of the carrier's pilots it represents. Watch an explanation of what could have caused the crash »
The biggest union, SNPL, said Tuesday it has accepted Air France's assurances that no Airbus A330 or A340 will take off unless at least two of its three Pitot tubes have been replaced.
Union spokesman Eric Derivry added that there is no indication that the Pitot tubes caused the accident.
Air France said over the weekend that it began to notice in May of last year that Pitot tubes sometimes briefly iced up at high altitude on A330s and A340s. That caused "a loss of airspeed data," according to the airline -- that is, the pilots didn't know the plane's speed.
Air France decided to replace all its probes starting April 27, following laboratory tests earlier in the year, the airline said. That is the program the pilots say the airline has promised to complete within days.
Wreckage hauled in from the Atlantic over the weekend includes pieces of the aircraft's wing section.
The location of the crash has not been determined, since ocean currents have moved the bodies and debris.
The ocean depth where the debris and bodies have been found varies, but averages about 3000 meters (nearly 9,900 feet) deep, according to the University of New Hampshire/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Joint Hydrographic Center. The search area covers 200,000 square km (77,220 square miles), nearly the size of Romania, Brazilian officials said.
Brazilian officials emphasized Monday that finding bodies was their main priority. The French are in charge of finding the voice and data recorders.
Fourteen aircraft -- 12 Brazilian and two French -- were participating, along with five Brazilian ships and one French frigate. The U.S. Navy will contribute two high-tech acoustic devices to listen underwater for the emergency beacons that are attached to the voice and data recorders.
The "towed pinger locators," which help search for emergency beacons on downed aircraft to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet -- will be placed aboard two French tugs that are part of the search efforts, the official said.
By MARCO SIBAJA and GREG KELLER,Associated Press Writer
AP - 53 minutes ago
RECIFE, Brazil - Two Brazilian helicopters took off Tuesday morning from the islands of Fernando de Noronha to pick up 16 bodies of Air France crash victims, as airline chiefs at a conference insisted the Airbus A330 was one of the safest planes in the world to fly.
The bodies of those on Flight 447 were being brought in by a Brazilian navy ship, then were being flown by helicopter to Fernando de Noronha and by plane to the northeastern coastal city of Recife, where experts will try to identify them.
At an industry conference in Kuala Lumpur, Emirates Airlines President Tim Clark said the Dubai-based company has a fleet of 29 A330-200 planes that have been flying since 1998.
"It is a very robust airplane. It has been flying for many years, clocking hundreds of millions of hours and there is absolutely no reason why there should be any question over this plane. It is one of the best flying today," he said.
In a video posted Monday on a Web site, Brazil's air force revealed that search crews had recovered the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of Flight 447 _ which could provide key clues as to why the airliner with 228 people on board went down in the Atlantic and where best to search for the black boxes.
The tail section includes the vertical stabilizer _ which keeps the plane's nose from swinging back and forth _ and the rudder, which controls the side-to-side motion of an aircraft. The data and voice recorders are also located in the fuselage near the tail.
Eight more bodies also were found, bringing the total recovered to 24, Air Force Col. Henry Munhoz said. The plane disappeared during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on May 31 amid strong thunderstorms.
Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said if experts can determine the identity of a body and know where that person was sitting, their injuries could offer clues into the crash.
The Air Force video showed the piece being tethered to a ship. The part had Air France's blue-and-red stripes, was still its original triangular shape and was not visibly burned.
"That would reinforce the idea that the plane broke up in flight," he said. "If it hits intact, everything shatters in tiny pieces."
Crash theories being considered by investigators include the possibility that external speed monitors _ called Pitot tubes _ iced over and gave dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm.
The L-shaped metal Pitot tubes jut from the wing or fuselage of a plane, and are heated to prevent icing. The pressure of air entering the tubes lets sensors measure the speed and angle of flight. An iced-over, blocked or malfunctioning Pitot tube could cause an airspeed sensor to fail, and lead the computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous fashion.
Eric Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL union, the main union for Air France pilots, told France-Info radio that all jets taking off on Tuesday would be equipped with two of the new Pitot sensors.
A memo sent to Air France pilots by the Alter union Monday and obtained by The Associated Press urges them to refuse to fly unless at least two of the three Pitot sensors on each planes have been replaced.
An official with the Alter union, speaking on condition of anonymity because the memo was not publicly released, said there is a "strong presumption" among its pilot members that a Pitot problem precipitated the crash. The memo says the airline should have grounded all A330 and A340 jets pending the replacement, and warns of a "real risk of loss of control" due to Pitot problems.
Air France said it began replacing the Pitot tubes on the Airbus A330 model on April 27 after an improved version became available, and will finish the work in the "coming weeks." The monitors had not yet been replaced on the plane that crashed.
David Epstein, Qantas Airways General Manager for Government and Corporate Affairs, said two companies manufacture the Pitot monitors for the A330 planes _ France's Thales Group and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Goodrich Corp.
The Air France plane uses sensors made by Thales while Qantas uses those by Goodrich for its 28 A330 planes, he said.
Goelz said the faulty airspeed readings and the fact the vertical stabilizer was sheared from the jet could be related.
The Airbus A330-200 has a "rudder limiter" which constricts how much the rudder can move at high speeds. If it were to move too far while traveling fast, it could shear off and take the vertical stabilizer with it.
"If you had a wrong speed being fed to the computer by the Pitot tube, it might allow the rudder to over travel," Goelz said.
Asked if the rudder or stabilizer being sheared off could have brought the jet down, Goelz said: "Absolutely. You need a rudder. And you need the (rudder) limiter on there to make sure the rudder doesn't get torn off or cause havoc with the plane's aerodynamics."
The discoveries of debris and the bodies also are helping searchers narrow their hunt for the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, commonly known as the "black boxes," perhaps investigators' best hope of learning what happened to the flight.
The wreckage and the bodies were found roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast, and about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from where the jet was last heard from.
Searchers must move quickly to find the recorders because acoustic beacons, or "pingers" on the boxes begin to fade 30 days after crashes.
Some high-tech help is on the way for investigators: two U.S. Navy devices capable of picking up the pingers to a depth of 20,000 feet (6,100 meters).
The listening devices are 5 feet (1.5 meters) long and weigh 70 pounds (32 kilos). One will be towed by a Brazilian ship, the other by a French vessel, slowly trawling in a grid pattern across the search area. The devices will be dropped into the ocean near the debris field by Thursday, Berges said.
The French nuclear attack submarine Emeraude, arriving later this week, also will try to find the acoustic pings, military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said.
France's defense minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved in the crash.
___
Marco Sibaja reported from Recife and Bradley Brooks from Rio de Janeiro. AP Writers Alan Clendenning and Stan Lehman in Sao Paulo; Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur; and Cecile Brisson, Angela Charlton, Emma Vandore and Greg Keller in Paris, contributed to this report.
Brazilian Air Force officer shows a picture during a press conference to announce the recovery of more bodies.
FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil: Brazilian and French officials have been preparing to identify the first 16 bodies recovered from an area in the Atlantic where an Air France jet crashed over a week ago killing all 228 people aboard.
A Brazilian navy ship was to bring the bodies close to Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archipelago, where they were to be transferred by helicopter early Tuesday.
From there, they were to be flown by plane to Recife, a mainland coastal city where a morgue had been set up to identify the remains using DNA samples from relatives and dental records.
Brazilian officials said late Monday they had recovered 24 bodies since Saturday from the crash zone 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) off Brazil's northeast coast.
French officials later said at least another five bodies were on a French frigate helping the Brazilian navy recovery operation, bringing the total number of bodies so far recovered to 29.
A Brazilian navy ship recovered the tail fin of the Air France Airbus A330 on Monday and was bringing it to shore. That was seen as the most important piece yet recovered from the plane, which went down June 1 on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. No distress call was received from the pilots.
The plane's black boxes were mounted in the tail section, and the fin's location could narrow the underwater search for those devices by a French submarine expected to arrive in the zone on Wednesday.
The clock is ticking for finding the devices, believed to lie on the sea floor at a depth of up to 6,000 meters (19,700 feet). Their homing beacons will cease to operate in three weeks.
The US Navy said the first of two towable pinger locators would arrive Wednesday to try to locate the data and voice recorders.
A French nuclear submarine was due the same day to also conduct underwater sweeps for the beacons.
If the black boxes are found, a French research sub -- the same one that has explored the wreck of the Titanic -- will be deployed to recover them. That small sub, the Nautile, is also expected to arrive within days.
The disaster is the worst aviation accident since 2001, and unprecedented in Air France's 75-year history.
Early suspicions are focusing on the Airbus A330's airspeed sensors, which appear to have malfunctioned in the minutes before the catastrophe according to some of the 24 automatic data warnings sent by the plane.
Investigators are looking at whether the sensors, known as pitots, could have iced over, possibly leading the Air France pilots to fly into a storm in the zone that day without knowing their airspeed.
France's transport minister Dominique Bussereau has said that scenario could have led the pilots to set the plane at "too low a speed, which can cause it to stall, or too high a speed, which can lead to the plane ripping up as it approached the speed of sound, as the outer skin is not designed to resist such speed."
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