French authorities will begin next week a third attempt to locate flight data recorders at the site of last year's Airbus A330 passenger plane crash off the coast of Brazil, the chief investigator of the crash said.
Air France Flight 447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into the Atlantic on June 1 killing all 228 people on board. The crash was the worst in the airline's 75-year history, and the world's worst for almost a decade.
"Without finding the recorders this investigation could never be conclusive and this accident could remain largely unexplained," Jean-Paul Troadec, head of the BEA French investigation agency, told a news conference in Brazil on Thursday.
The four-week operation will involve the U.S. Anne Candies and Norway's Seabed Worker ships, which have powerful sonars and deep-water robot vehicles to help with the search of the plane's debris at the depth of up to 13,000 feet (4,000 meters).
The new $13.3-million search is jointly financed by Airbus and Air France, and comes after two search attempts last year failed to determine what had caused the crash of a very reliable aircraft, such as Airbus A330.
A team of professional Air France pilots concluded last year that faulty air speed sensors were the main cause of the tragedy. Their report was based on automatic messages sent by on-board computers just before the crash.
EASA, a European Union safety agency, has banned the model of Thales sensor, which was installed on the crashed Air France jet and restricted the use of a newer Thales model, following a preliminary investigation into the Flight 447 crash.
But the BEA agency insisted, though, that the defective speed sensors might not be the only explanation for the accident.
Only 51 bodies and over a thousand pieces of debris have been recovered from the crash site so far.
RIO DE JANEIRO, March 26 (RIA Novosti)
