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:

The wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which disappeared in 2009, has finally been located nearly 13,000 feet deep on the Atlantic seafloor.
The discovery was achieved through the application of statistical analysis to narrow down the vast search area, rather than relying on luck.
Major sections of the aircraft and 50 passenger bodies were found, with a new mission planned to recover them and the flight recorders.
The flight data recorder has since been recovered, offering crucial potential clues to the crash cause.

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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.