Air France 447 Wreckage Found

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 09:01 PM ET

Verified

An engine from the Airbus A330 that
was Air France Flight 447 on the floor
of the Atlantic at a depth of approximately
12,800 feet. BEA

Key Takeaways:

Wreckage of Air France Flight 447, missing since June 2009, has been located nearly 13,000 feet deep on the Atlantic seafloor.
The discovery was achieved through statistical analysis used to narrow the vast search area, rather than random luck.
Major sections of the plane, including wings, engines, and tail, along with 50 passenger bodies, have been identified.
A new recovery mission is underway, and the flight data recorder (black box) has since been found, expected to provide critical clues to the crash.

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The disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the deep water Atlantic while en route from Rio to Paris on June 1, 2009, shocked the world and left a web of mysteries. What happened to bring the Airbus A330 with 228 people aboard down in the middle of the dark night? Theories, many of them speculative, abounded, including malfunctioning speed sensors or flight computers. Despite the lack of a clear cause, the crash is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation in France. Other questions remain: What happened to the wreckage? Was it too deep to recover? Would it ever be found?

Last week, at least a few of those questions were answered. The BEA, France’s aviation investigation authority, announced that it had located wreckage on the sea floor, nearly 13,000 feet below the surface.