PARIS (AP) — Air France had not acted on a recommendation to change airspeed-detecting instruments on Flight 447 before the plane crashed in turbulent weather, the French agency investigating the disaster said Saturday.
The French accident investigation agency, BEA, found the doomed plane received inconsistent airspeed readings by different instruments as it struggled in a massive thunderstorm on its flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard.
RECIFE, Brazil – Searchers found two bodies and the first confirmed debris — a briefcase containing an Air France Flight 447 ticket — in the Atlantic Ocean near where the jetliner is believed to have crashed, a Brazil military official said Saturday.
The French agency investigating the disaster, meanwhile, said airspeed instruments were not replaced as the maker recommended before the plane disappeared in turbulent weather nearly a week ago during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard.
All were killed, the world's worst commercial air accident since 2001, and Air France's deadliest plane crash.
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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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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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PARIS -- Three young Irish doctors, all close friends, enjoying a two-week vacation together in Brazil.
That's how their families want to remember Aisling Butler, 26, Jane Deasy, 27, and Eithne Walls, 29 _ three of the 228 passengers who met with tragedy as Air France Flight 447 ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.
The women boarded the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Sunday night after a reunion with a larger group of former students who graduated in 2007 from Trinity College medical school.
Aisling's father John Butler paid tribute to his daughter Tuesday from his home in Roscrea, County Tipperary.
"She was a truly wonderful, exciting girl," he told Irish reporters. "She never flunked an exam in her life _ nailed every one of them _ and took it all in her stride as well."
He initially thought Aisling was booked on Monday's flight and had to retrieve her itinerary from his deleted e-mails to check.
"When I opened it up, a nightmare opened up as well," he said.
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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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