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FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil: Navy ships are due to arrive Wednesday at a zone in the Atlantic off Brazil's coast where an Air France plane carrying 228 people crashed this week, as investigators focused on finding answers to the tragedy.
The first of the Brazilian navy vessels is to arrive early Wednesday, joining three cargo ships from France and the Netherlands that were rerouted to the area on Monday after debris from Air France flight AF 447 was spotted.
A Brazilian air force plane fitted with night-vision sensors conducted overnight sweeps of the zone, located around 500 kilometres (300 miles) northeast of Brazil's Fernando do Noronha archipelago, itself 400 kilometres from the mainland, officials said.
Another three air force aircraft were to be deployed after dawn, when visual sweeps would also be made for any sign of bodies.
Defence Minister Nelson Jobim on Tuesday confirmed that the spot in Brazilian waters was the crash site of the Air France Airbus A330.
"There are no doubts" a five-kilometre strip of floating debris - including cables, plane components and fuel slicks - marked the spot where the full flight went down, he told reporters.
The evidence extinguished any lingering hopes of finding survivors and confirmed the worst civil aviation accident since 2001, when an American Airlines jet crashed in New York killing all 260 people on board.
Brazil on Tuesday announced three days of national mourning for those who perished on the Air France plane. Catholic and Muslim services were to be held in Paris on Wednesday, including one in Notre-Dame cathedral to be attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Flight AF 447 was four hours into its 11-hour voyage from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it suddenly issued a series of automated data alerts indicating multiple electrical and pressurisation failures and ceased contact with controllers.
The pilots did not issue any mayday distress call, leaving the accident a mystery - one that only the plane's black boxes can elucidate, if they can be found in Atlantic waters as deep as 6,000 metres.
Brazil's air force said France's Bureau of Investigations and Analyses (BEA) was responsible for the investigation into what was Air France's worst accident in its 70-year history.
A team of BEA officials were already at work in Brazil, it said.
Two operations would be conducted in parallel, Jobim said: the recovery of the debris, and the search for bodies.
Any human remains would be taken by ship to Fernando de Noronha, where they would be flown out on air force aircraft.
More than half of those travelling on the Air France jet were either French or Brazilian. The others came from 30 countries, mostly in Europe.
The 216 passengers included 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby. The crew comprised 11 French nationals and one Brazilian.
The 58-year-old French captain had been flying for Air France since 1988 and had a great deal of experience, the airline said.
Air France has suggested the four-year-old plane could have been struck by lightning - a fairly common hazard that by itself should not knock out a modern airliner, but coupled with other problems such as violent turbulence it could be dangerous.
Other theories advanced by experts include pilot error, mechanical defects or even the remote possibility of terrorism.
"No hypothesis is being favoured at the moment," French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Tuesday.
"Our only certainty is that there was no distress call sent by the plane, but regular automatic alerts sent over three minutes indicated the failure of all systems," he said.
A French ship was on its way to the zone, carrying two mini-submarines capable of operating at depths of 6,000 metres (19,700 feet), which is also the limit aircraft black boxes can survive for up to 30 days.
But any recovery would be extremely tricky, not only because of the depth, but also because of powerful currents and storms in the zone.
"To find the plane, you'll need ships equipped with a special sonar, and possibly also rescue submarines - it's an enormous undertaking," Commander Ronaldo Jenkins, safety coordinator for Brazil's airline association, told
- AFP/yb
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