First Photos of Wreckage from Air France Flight 447

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 08:50 PM ET

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Key Takeaways:

The wreckage of Air France Flight 447 has been located, and its flight data recorder has been successfully recovered.
Recovery teams are working to retrieve various aircraft components, including engines, landing gear, wing sections, and fuselage parts, from significant depths.
These recovered components and their disbursement patterns are crucial for investigators to determine the cause of the accident.

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The wreckage from AF 447 has been located. The flight data recorder has also now been recovered — Click here to see photos of the black box search effort.

The team is moving to recover as much wreckage from the site as possible. Given the great depths involved, that won’t be an easy task. But every component, including the engines, has an important story to tell investigators.

The remains of a landing gear bogey situated alongside some associated structure.

Ghostly still in the deep, part of a landing gear assembly for the Airbus A330.

Battered remains of the trailing edge of the left wing of the A330 with flight controls gone.

Some components are nearly intact. Others are hard to recognize. These fuselage sections are heavily damaged, whether from the impact with the water or from damage while airborne will be up to investigators to determine.

A sonar sidescan of the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 on the floor of the Atlantic. The disbursement pattern will offer clues to investigators seeking to determine what went so terribly wrong in the last minutes of the flight.

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