Air accident investigators are closer to revealing what caused an Air France jet to crash into the Atlantic two years ago, killed all 228 people onboard, after recovering the flight data recorder from the ocean bed.
They confirmed this week that they had been able to retrieve data from the ‘black boxes’, including the final words spoken from the cockpit.
Data from memory cards extracted from the boxes and cleaned and dried over the weekend has been successfully downloaded, they said.
This includes vital information, including the whole recording of the last two hours of the flight from the cockpit voice recorder.
They said material is now being analysed and an interim report into the crash is expected to be published this summer, although a final verdict will not be revealed until 2012.
Flight AF 447 plunged into the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil in June 2009 after running into a thunderstorm four hours into a flight to Paris.
By Linsey McNeill
