The wreckage of Air France Flight 447

Click on the picture to see more pictures of the stricken aircraft

At a press conference held on April 4, 2011, investigators from BEA, the French air accident investigation agency, present photographs of portions of Air France Flight 447, an Airbus 330 which disappeared en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, May 31, 2009, with 228 people aboard.

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Airbus A330 Recovery: Bodies and Wreckage

Specialists could start pulling up bodies and wreckage from an Air France plane found on the Atlantic Ocean floor within a month, after the stunning deep-water discovery raised new hope of determining the cause of the 2009 crash.

Investigators said Monday they still haven’t found the plane’s “black box” flight recorders, and it’s unclear whether they remain attached to the fuselage, or whether they’re even still intact after nearly two years in sandy depths of 3,900 meters (2.4 miles).

All 228 people aboard the plane were killed when Flight 447, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, slammed into the ocean northeast of Brazil on June 1, 2009, after running into an intense high-altitude thunderstorm. The cause of the crash — the worst in Air France’s history — remains unclear.

French officials said Monday that undersea robots have located bodies, motors and most of the Airbus jet in a fourth underwater search operation, after the last two search efforts turned up nothing. Investigators have said without the recorders, the cause of the crash may never be determined.

France’s air accident investigation agency, the BEA, showed photos of the wreckage — intact wheels from the plane’s landing gear, two engines dusted with silt, a panel of the fuselage with oval window openings.

The BEA did not show images of any bodies. French officials said identifiable bodies have been found and will be raised to the ocean surface, but would not say how many or further comment out of respect for the victims’ families.

Fifty bodies were found during the first phase of the search, along with more than 600 pieces of the plane scattered on the sea. No bodies or debris have been found since, until now.

Victims’ families, who had pushed for continued search efforts despite the high cost, cautiously welcomed the surprise announcement.

BEA chief Jean-Paul Troadec told reporters Monday that he’s confident that engineers can still read the data and recordings in the black boxes, if they weren’t damaged in the crash.

Titanic team locate missing Air France AF447 Airbus A330

The mysterious crash of an Air France airliner in 2009 may be a step nearer to being solved: wreckage of the aircraft, and the bodies of some of the victims, have finally been located on the mid-Atlantic seabed by a trio of robotic search submarines operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

It means investigators may finally be able to find the plane's flight recorders and find out why the 228 people on board lost their lives.

Flight AF447, an Airbus A330 twin-engined jet flying from Rio to Paris, inexplicably entered a series of violent tropical storm cells in in mid-Atlantic in the early hours of 1 June 2009 - when all other air traffic was avoiding the storms.

The plane never emerged - and wreckage and bodies of passengers and crew were found afloat on the ocean in following days.

Why the plane entered the storm system, and what downed it, is a mystery - and data on its cockpit voice and flight data recorders may be able to reveal the answers. But the plane's flight recorders were not recovered from the floating wreckage and three prior submarine searches organised by the BEA, the French air accident investigator, have failed to locate them.

The submarine robots WHOI is using in the BEA's latest search are far more agile than in previous searches - and use a novel sonar image mosaicing technique honed during WHOI's 2010 mapping of the complete debris field of the RMS Titanic.

The way the sonar image stripes are stitched together reduces the risk that detail will be lost where the images are joined, says WHOI project leader David Gallo.

It seems to have worked. On 3 April the BEA announced that pieces of an aircraft had not only been found in the circa 4000-metre-deep search area - a similar depth to Titanic - but had also been positively identified as belonging to the doomed Air France Airbus.

Speaking on Inter Radio today, French transport minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said that a "large part" of the Airbus had been found, surrounded by a large debris field, and that part of the cabin contained bodies. Some of the bodies should be identifiable, she added. The Telegraph has translated her interview here.

Peter Neenan, lawyer for one group of AF447 victims' families at Stewarts Law in London, is cautiously optimistic that the finding will lead to the location of the flight recorders - and some answers. "The families will be waiting anxiously for further updates from the BEA," he says.

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