RIO DE JANEIRO – Brazilian and French salvage teams searching for the wreckage of Air France flight 447 pulled 16 bodies from the Atlantic Ocean, as investigators probed whether unreliable speed readings caused last week’s crash.
Brazilian air force colonel Henry Munhoz said dozens of structural components from the Airbus SAS A330-200, which went down with 228 people aboard, have also been salvaged.
“The government is making every effort, through the navy and air force, to find, if possible, all the bodies, because we know what it means for a family to recover their loved ones that are missing,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said yesterday.
The discovery of the bodies and aircraft parts was the latest break in an investigation increasingly focused on whether the aircraft’s speed sensors functioned properly. The flight, which was travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, gave inconsistent speed readings before disappearing over the Atlantic on June 1st.
The US Navy is sending equipment and personnel to help search for the aircraft’s flight data recorders, known as black boxes, and two French mini-submarines are scheduled to arrive in the area later this week. The recorders have water-activated “pingers” that run for 30 days and remain intact as deep as 3.8 miles (6.1km), about twice the depth of the ocean where the debris has been found. – (Bloomberg)