Brazil's navy recovered the tail fin of Air France flight AF 447 on Monday, a week after the Airbus A330 vanished over the Atlantic on 1 June while carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
The tail section matters because that is where the aircraft's flight recorders were housed; its location could help focus the underwater search for those devices. A French submarine was due in the area on Wednesday, and the US Navy planned to send two towed pinger locators and about 20 personnel. The French research submersible Nautile was also en route.
Navy crews were transporting 16 bodies recovered from floating debris over the weekend to Fernando de Noronha before their transfer to Recife, where forensic teams stood ready to carry out identification using dental records and DNA samples from relatives.
The recorders are thought to lie at depths of up to 6,000 meters, some 1,100 kilometers off Brazil's northeast coast. Their locator beacons will fall silent within three weeks.
Early suspicion centers on the pitot airspeed sensors, which may have iced over. France's transport minister noted that faulty speed data could have left pilots flying into a storm blind to their actual velocity, risking a stall or structural failure. No distress call was received.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in June 2009, in its own words.