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As for the Yemeni airliner that crashed, the black box has been recovered. Read the story here.

June 25, 2009 -- Updated 1445 GMT (2245 HKT)

Story Highlights

• Search crews recover bodies of flight captain and steward from crash
  
• All 228 people onboard flight 447 from Brazil to France were killed
  
• None of names of bodies recovered have been released at request of families
  

A Brazilian diver floats on wreckage of Flight 447 earlier this month. The search for more debris continues.

(CNN) -- Search crews have recovered the bodies of the flight captain and a steward from the Air France flight that crashed off the coast of Brazil.

The two flight members are among the victims that have been identified, Air France said in a statement Thursday.

About a dozen victims have been identified among roughly 50 bodies recovered from the crash of Flight 447, which killed 228 people on June 1, authorities in Brazil said this week.

Crews continue to search for bodies, wreckage and flight-data recorders that apparently rest deep on the ocean floor. Data from the recorders may be crucial in helping investigators determine what caused the plane to crash.

Autopsies conducted on some of the 50 bodies found so far show they suffered broken bones, including arms, legs and hips, Brazilian authorities have told French investigators, according to Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of the French accident investigation board.

Such injuries suggest that the plane broke apart in midair, experts have said.

Asked about that theory, Air France Chief Executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon told France's RTL radio this week that he would not go that far.

"What I know is that the investigators would like to know the causes of death," Gourgeon said. "That knowledge of causes of death will better clarify what exactly happened. Were the victims killed before the impact, or during impact?"

Searchers have found dozens of pieces of debris in the water and think they know the general location of the wreck, but Arslanian said this week that there is a chance the entire aircraft may never be found.

Air France plans to pay relatives of the victims an initial compensation equivalent to about $24,500, or 17,500 euros, for each victim, Gourgeon has said.

The airliner said this week that it has been in touch with about 1,800 relatives of the people who died when the Airbus A330 crashed, but that it has been difficult tracing the relatives of all 228 victims.

"The modern world is different and we often have only a cell phone, and as you can imagine, this cell phone is unfortunately in the aircraft," Gourgeon said. "So we probably (will put in) more hours to access all the relatives."

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The company is also providing families with counseling, he said.

The were 32 different nationalities present on Flight 447.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

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06/23/2009 | 05:30 PM

PARIS — A French official says sounds detected by search teams in the Atlantic depths are not those of Flight 447's black boxes.

The aide to France's top transport official, Jean-Louis Borloo, says the "black boxes have not been detected." The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to be publicly named.

She said Tuesday that French military ships searching in the area where the plane crashed have "heard sounds" but that those were not signals from the flight's voice or data recorders.

Earlier Tuesday, French newspaper Le Monde reported that French ships had detected a "very weak signal" from the black boxes.

The boxes are key to determining what happened to the Air France plane that plunged into the ocean May 31, killing all 228 aboard. - AP

From GMANews.tv; see the source article here.

Posted: 22 June 2009 0507 hrs

Crew members of a Brazilian Air Force Super Puma helicopter unload corpses of Air France airflight 447 passengers.

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

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

June 19, 2009 -- Updated 1619 GMT (0019 HKT)

Story Highlights

• 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.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

Posted: 19 June 2009 1540 hrs

Sao Paulo Fashion Week

SAO PAULO - Top model Gisele Bundchen and Madonna's "toyboy" Jesus Luz opened Brazil's top fashion show this week, but the focus was just as much on race as the racy summerwear and celebrities on parade.

For the first time, the Sao Paulo Fashion Week - Latin America's pre-eminent fashion event - has imposed quotas requiring at least 10 percent of the models to be black or indigenous.

The measure was brought in after intense pressure from anti-racism groups and Brazilian prosecutors who blasted the SPFW's longstanding bias towards white models.

Previously, only a handful of black models featured among the 350 or so that sashayed down the catwalk -- usually less than three percent, far from representative in a country where nearly 50 percent of the population is of African descent.

A group of 30 black models holding an informal "Fashion Black" runway show in front of the SPFW venue applauded the boost the quota was expected to give to their careers.

"There shouldn't only be whites in the Fashion Week. There should be more blacks, to show black culture, show the black beauty in society," Caroline Naiara, 16, told AFP.

Beside her, Charles Junior, a male model, added that the quota "will give more opportunities, because we blacks currently have to leave the country to do our job."

The organizer of the impromptu show, Andre de Souza, said he backed the quota, but only as a first step towards what should be full inclusion of blacks in Brazil's fashion industry.

"We think 10 percent is very little. And there shouldn't have to be quotas for black models. We want more to see black producers, black stylists, people who work in fashion generally, to be more a part of the market," he said.

He and the black models said the preponderance of whites in the SPFW was symptomatic of a wider discrimination in Brazil against blacks born of its slavery past.

Backstage in the SPFW, several of the 40 fashion companies taking part were happy to show off the one or two black models being prepared for their runway sorties.

A few employees, though, said quietly -- and well away from reporters' microphones -- that the measure did not take into account that the European-inspired fashions were created for thin white bodies, not more rounded and chesty black physiques.

They also said that very few blacks bought their wares -- a situation that pointed up the vast income gap between the predominantly black poorer half of Brazil and the predominantly white middle- and upper-class.

The June 17-22 SPFW was being presented under a French-inspired "Passion for Fashion" theme that also showcased displays of French haute-couture, part of a months-long cultural program celebrating the Year of France in Brazil.

Bikinis and ultra-lightweight summerwear was being rolled out for the 2009/2010 season.

Bundchen, one of the world's top supermodels, led the mode march.

She starred in a show by the fashion house Colcci with Luz, a formerly unknown male model who has become a mini-celebrity in Brazil thanks to a fling with Madonna.

The 22-year-old guy from Rio has seen his career and runway pay skyrocket after being photographed late last year kissing the US pop star after a Brazilian concert she gave.

But he has denied any deeper relationship with the 50-year-old Material Girl, saying they "are friends" and nothing more despite being spotted accompanying her a couple of times in recent months. - AFP/fa

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

June 18, 2009 -- Updated 1843 GMT (0243 HKT)

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Maker of flight data recorder aboard AF447 has "100 percent" recovery rate
  
• Top executive says finding flight data recorder could reveal cause of air crash
  
• Plane wreckage believed to be on Atlantic seabed, around 4,500 meters deep
  
• Device's underwater locator beacon has limited battery life
  

A Brazilian diver floats on wreckage of Flight 447 spotted Wednesday.

(CNN) -- A top executive for the company which built the flight data recorder aboard Air France Flight 447 says he hopes his firm's 100 percent recovery record from air accidents will be maintained despite concerns the device may be lost at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Although some debris has been retrieved, air crash investigators remain in the dark about what caused the airliner to plunge into the sea off the coast of Brazil with 228 people onboard earlier this month. The wreckage is believed to be about 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) deep, amid underwater mountains and mixed in with tons of sea trash.

A French nuclear submarine and other vessels are searching for the flight data recorder by attempting to trace its locator beacon, which sends acoustic pulses, or "pings," to searchers.

The U.S. Navy has contributed two high-tech acoustic devices -- known as towed pinger locators -- which have been attached to French tug boats and can search to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet.

Honeywell Aerospace's Paolo Carmassi -- the firm's president for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India -- told CNN that retrieving the flight data could help solve the mystery of the plane's fate and said his company had never lost a black box involved in an accident.

"We believe that our technology is well-positioned to, in this case, contribute to solve the big question around this particular accident," Carmassi said.

"We have a 100 percent recovery rate of all the black boxes that we have installed that unfortunately may have been involved in accidents so we hope that we will be able to maintain our record and be able to shed some light on what happened."

But Carmassi acknowledged it was hard to estimate how much battery life the locator beacon had left.

"There is a certain duration which depends on the particular environmental conditions, whether it's underwater or on land, whether it's at 10 meters or 4,000 meters; so it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly the duration," he said.

Yann Cochennec, an aviation expert with Air et Cosmos magazine, told CNN that a recorder had been retrieved from the seabed in 2004 after an Egyptian charter flight crashed into the Red Sea shortly after leaving Sharm el-Sheikh.

But he said the depth of the Atlantic, strong currents and bad weather would make retrieving the recorder from the Air France wreckage far more difficult.

The flight data recorder -- sometimes called a "black box" -- is actually an orange, metal cylinder weighing about 13 pounds. Inside is a stack of memory chips designed to survive high temperatures, strong impact and tons of pressure.

The devices record virtually every detail about how an aircraft is working, including cabin pressure, speed and altitude, remaining fuel and whether that fuel is flowing properly. They have played a crucial part in air crash investigations since they were first fitted to commercial aircraft in the 1940s.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

June 17, 2009 -- Updated 1954 GMT (0354 HKT)

Story Highlights

• 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.

Air France Flight 447 went down in stormy weather while flying from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.

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."

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

Image by MATEUS_27:24&25 via Flickr

Posted: 15 June 2009 0602 hrs

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

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

Image by Michael @ NW Lens via Flickr

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.

William Waldock, who teaches air crash investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said the damage he saw looks like a lateral fracture.

"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.

From Yahoo! News; see the source article here.

Posted: 09 June 2009 1330 hrs

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."

- AFP /ls

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

Posted: 09 June 2009 0242 hrs

Handout picture released by the Brazilian Navy showing divers recovering a huge part of the rudder.

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil: Brazil's navy on Monday recovered the tail fin from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic a week ago, and was transporting 16 bodies to shore for identification.

The recovery of the fin was seen as important to the search for answers as to what knocked the Airbus A330, flight AF 447, out of the sky on June 1 as it was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board.

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.

Brazilian officials meanwhile were preparing to receive the 16 bodies plucked from amid the floating debris over the weekend.

Those remains, and dozens of the plane's structural components which have also been picked up, were expected to arrive in the Brazilian archipelago Fernando de Noronha early on Tuesday.

From there the bodies would be flown to the mainland coastal city of Recife, a navy spokesman in Recife, Captain Guicemar Tabosa told reporters.

Brazilian police forensic teams have been set up to identify the bodies using dental records and DNA from relatives.

Tabosa said navy crews had not yet confirmed information given by families on the doomed flight that it appeared two more bodies had been spotted on Monday.

Brazilian and French officials said there was no hope of finding survivors from the downed plane.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in his weekly radio address on Monday that "everything was being done... so that we can find, if possible, all the bodies, because we know how much it means for a family to receive their lost loved one."
Brazilian and French teams continued to scour the crash zone 1,100 kilometres off Brazil's northeast coast for more bodies and pieces of wreckage.

The clock is ticking for finding the black boxes, believed to lie on the sea floor at a depth of up to 6,000 metres. Their homing beacons will cease to operate in three weeks.

The US Navy said on Sunday it would send two towable pinger locators and a crew of around 20 to the scene later this week to join the hunt for the devices.

"The first ship should head to the scene on (June) 10th," Pentagon spokesman and US navy commander Jeffrey Gordon told AFP. "They can be used for locating submarines or anything under the water that can emit a sound."

If the voice and data recorders 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.

No distress call was received from the flight crew of the doomed plane.

Early suspicions are focusing on the Airbus A330's airspeed sensors, which appeared 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.

Such a scenario could have resulted in "two bad consequences for the survival of the plane," France's transport minister Dominique Bussereau told French radio on the weekend.

They were, he said: "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." - AFP/de

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.