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Brazil recovers 1st Air France jet debris

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-06-05 08:05

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil -- A Brazilian helicopter crew recovered the first wreckage from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, pulling a cargo pallet from the sea. No sign of human remains have been spotted, and Air France has told families that the jetliner broke apart, killing all 228 people on board.

A freezer truck is unloaded from a Brazilian air force plane during search operations for the remains of an Air France jet at the airport in Fernando de Noronha, Brazil, Thursday, June 4, 2009. [Agencies]

Two buoys -- standard emergency equipment on planes -- also were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean about 340 miles (550 kilometers) northeast of Brazil's northern Fernando de Noronha islands by the helicopter crew, which was working off a Brazilian navy ship.

Air France's CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon told family members at a private meeting that the Airbus A330 disintegrated, either in the air or when it slammed into the ocean and there were no survivors, according to Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, a grief counselor who was asked by Paris prosecutors to help counsel relatives.

Soldiers at Fernando de Noronha's airport, where any recovered human remains would be taken, unloaded body bags and a refrigerator truck on Thursday from a military plane.

Flight 447 disappeared en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Sunday night, the deadliest crash in Air France history and the world's worst commercial air accident since 2001.

With the crucial "black box" voice and data recorders still missing, investigators were relying heavily on the plane's automated messages to help reconstruct what happened as the jet flew through towering thunderstorms.

The messages detail a series of failures that end with its systems shutting down, suggesting the plane broke apart in the sky, according to an aviation industry official with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the crash.

"What is clear is that there was no landing. There's no chance the escape slides came out," said Denoix de Saint-Marc, who heads a victims' association for UTA Flight 772, which Libyan terrorists downed with a suitcase bomb in 1989.

Related readings:  Debris confirms crash of Air France Flight 447  Air France flight missing with 228 aboard  Brazil finds more plane crash debris  What might have made French plane disappear?  Plane with 9 Chinese crashes into sea

France's accident investigation agency said only two findings have been established so far: One is that the series of automatic messages sent from Flight 447 gave conflicting signals about the plane's speed; the other is that the flight path went through dangerously stormy weather.

The agency warned against any "hasty interpretation or speculation" after the French newspaper Le Monde reported, without naming sources, that the Air France plane was flying at the wrong speed.

France has invited the US National Transportation Safety Board to help in the accident investigation. The US team also includes General Electric Aviation of Cincinnati, Ohio, which made the plane's engines, and Honeywell International Inc. of Morristown, N.J., which made the black boxes and parts of the communication and navigation systems.

Seas were calm Thursday with periodic rain as ships converged on three debris sites to recover wreckage, but French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said extreme cloudiness" prevented US satellites from helping.

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