Bodies from Air France crash found: Official

Brazil’s air force on Saturday recovered bodies from an Air France jetliner that came down over the Atlantic on June 1 with 228 people on board, a spokesman said.

“We confirm the recovery from the water debris and bodies from the Air France plane,” Colonel Jorge Amaral told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife. “We can’t give more information without confirming what we have,” he said.

For days an international fleet of aircraft and ships have been searching the open Atlantic in the hope of finding clues of how Air France flight 447 vanished on route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Earlier finds had turned out not to be part of the crash, as searchers battled days of terrible weather conditions — with rain limiting the visibility and waves of up to 1.8 meters (six feet).

It was found during a probe that the Air France jet sent out 24 automatic error messages in its final moments as its systems —including the autopilot —shut down, investigators said on Saturday.

The director of the French air accident investigation agency, Paul-Louis Arslanian, said that it was impossible to tell from the signals whether the doomed crew had shut off the autopilot or whether it cut out.  The head of the air accident investigation agency said the missing Rio to Paris flight had suffered multiple systems failures in its final moments.

Automatic error messages broadcast by the A330 jet just prior to the crash showed that its autopilot had cut out after it received conflicting speed readings, BEA director Paul-Louis Arslanian told reporters.

“There is a programme of replacement, of improvement,” he said, adding that planes that have not yet had the replacement are not necessarily dangerous, and that in other cases pilots had been able to regain control.

Investigators seeking clues to what had caused flight AF 447 to crash so suddenly have so far had to rely on the automatic messages. Brazilian air force spotters have also spotted floating debris, and a French nuclear sub and a research ship equipped with mini-submarines are steaming to the scene. Early speculation as to the cause of the accident focused on foul weather, as the jet was flying through a thunderstorm, but Arslanian said the conditions had not been exceptional for the region.

He also played down the idea that a terrorist bomb might have destroyed the plane, saying that the 24 error messages showed the onboard electronic systems including the autopilot had shut down one by one. But he did not formally rule out an attack: “Really, that would be truly astonishing, but that’s not to say it is 100 per cent impossible.”