French, Brazilians still on hunt for downed Airbus

PARIS — French and Brazilian search teams have found no debris confirmed to have come from the Airbus A330 that vanished over the Atlantic, officials said Friday.

Confusion broke out after Brazilian officials said Thursday that a helicopter had plucked from the sea an airplane cargo pallet from the Air France flight — only to retract the claim hours later.

France's Transportation Minister, Dominique Bussereau, suggested Friday that searchers were back to square one in the hunt for Flight 447 bound from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which went down off Brazil late Sunday.

"French authorities have been saying for several days that we have to be extremely prudent," Bussereau told France's RTL radio. "Our planes and naval ships have seen nothing."

A French Defense Ministry official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said French teams "cannot precisely confirm the zone where the plane went down."

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Sub that explored Titanic to aid Flight 447 search

PARIS—A mini-submarine that explored the undersea wreckage of the Titanic is being whisked across the Atlantic to help retrieve the flight recorders of Air France Flight 447.

The French marine research institute Ifremer said Thursday it has pulled the ship Pourquoi Pas? (Why Not?) off a research mission in the Azores to help find the remains of the Airbus plane. Flight 447 disappeared Sunday night en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris after flying into a dangerous band of thunderstorms over the Atlantic Ocean.

On board the research ship is the Nautile, an 8-meter (26-foot) long deep ocean submarine that has made multiple dives to the Titanic and a remote-controlled robot called Victor 6000.

"The priority for us is to find the black boxes," said Vincent Rigaud, head of Ifremer's underwater system department. "We will do everything we can to find them."

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Channel Tunnel marks 15th anniversary — in black

UNDER THE ENGLISH CHANNEL – After three years of sweat and toil, Philippe Cozette tunneled into history one wintry day in 1990, using a compressed air drill to power through the last chunk of chalk marl separating undersea tubes extending from the shores of Calais in France to the white cliffs of Dover in England.

When the Frenchman reached through the hole to shake hands with his English colleague Robert Graham Fagg on the other side, the two countries were physically linked for the first time since the last Ice Age.

"Welcome to France," Cozette said in English. "Bonjour, mon ami," responded Fagg, before exclaiming in a distinctly English accent: "Vive la France!"

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