Images of Rio-Paris jet wreck to be made public
French crash investigators are to unveil the first undersea images of the wreck of an Air France passenger jet that crashed in the Atlantic in June 2009 with the loss of all 228 people on board.
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Investigators announced on Sunday that a fourth and final attempt to find the wreckage of the Airbus A330 that crashed en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris had been successful and promised to release photographs.
France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) boss, Jean-Paul Troadec, said that investigators now have a chance of finding the plane's black box data recorders.
Troadec said the parts of the wreckage that had been found consisted of "engines and certain elements of the wings".
Bodies have been seen in the area and photographed by three Remus autonomous submarines, French Transport Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told RTL radio on Monday.
The new search for the wreckage was launched on 25 March with the help of the Alucia, an exploration vessel of the US-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
The official cause remains undetermined, but it has been partly blamed on the speed sensors used by Airbus. Air France has been accused of not responding quickly enough to reports that they might be faulty.
Investigators hope that bringing the wreckage to the surface will help explain how the plane broke up and what caused it to crash.
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