Searchers on Thursday located more debris near where Air France Flight 447 went down in the Atlantic Ocean but officials said the matter didn't come from the airplane.
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Brazilian Air Force Brigadier Ramon Borges Cardoso (L) arrives to give a news conference in Recife, northeastern Brazil June 4, 2009. The first batch of debris recovered Thursday?from the Atlantic did not come from the Air France jet believed to have fallen down, Cardoso said.?[Xinhuanet.com] |
Four planes, including an AWACS aircraft from the Dakar French air base, helped locate the downed plane, said Christophe Prazuck, an official with the French Chief of Staff.
The searchers spotted some metal objects but they did not belong to the plane, he said.
The Airbus A330 broke apart likely in midair as it crashed into the Atlantic off Brazil's northeastern coast late Sunday during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The accident killed all 228 people aboard the plane and is the world's worst aviation disaster since 2001.
The Brazilian Navy, meanwhile, said it has salvaged the first batch of items from the crash area. However, Air Force Lieutenant-Brigadier Ramom Borges Cardoso said the debris did not come from the doomed plane.
Cardoso said oil tracks detected by the Navy also were not from the plane.
Eleven aircraft, including a P-3 Orion from the U.S. Air Force, are involved in the search for remnants of the plane. In addition to a Falcon 50 jet, the French government also sent submarines in an attempt to find the plane's black box.
France's air safety investigation agency said Wednesday it was not confident the black box, which contains voice and data recorders and is designed to last 30 days underwater, could be located.
The agency is expected to have an initial report on the disaster ready by the end of June, said its director Paul-Louis Arslanian.
Arslanian, calling the crash the most serious in French aviation history, said France will take charge of the investigation according to related international laws.
There are too many uncertainties regarding information obtained so far to determine a cause of the crash, Arslanian said. He said the complexity of the ocean area where the plane crashed also added to the difficulty of the investigation.
(Xinhua News Agency June 5, 2009)
