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PARIS : The French air safety investigation agency said Wednesday it was not optimistic that the black box flight data recorders of an Air France airliner that crashed into the Atlantic would be found.
At its first news conference since flight AF 447 between Rio and Paris disappeared Monday, the Office of Inquiries and Analysis (BEA) said it expected to have an initial report into the crash ready by the end of June.
Agency director Paul Louis Arslanian said he was "not totally optimistic" that the boxes would be recovered in the deep Atlantic and that even if they were they might not explain the cause of the crash of the Airbus A330 jet.
Separately, Airbus, a plane manufacturer based in southwest France, said it will provide any technical assistance the BEA might request for its probe into the accident that left 228 people dead.
It said that in normal circumstance it would send a team to the site of a crash but that because the plane went down in the sea part way between Brazil and Africa it had not yet decided how to proceed, a spokeman said.
The Paris prosecutor's office meanwhile said it would "rapidly" open a formal judicial inquiry into the crash.
- AFP /ls
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