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Saturday 6 June 2009

Bodies of two men and an Air France ticket found floating in ocean near where Flight 447 disappeared

The Brazilian Air Force has found the bodies of two men floating in the ocean near where investigators believe doomed Air France Flight 447 crashed. The first bodies from the crash were found early on Saturday morning, spokesman Jorge Amaral told reporters in the north-eastern Brazilian city of Recife.

'This morning at 8:14 a.m., we confirmed the retrieval from the water of pieces and bodies that belonged to the Air France flight,' Amaral said.

Among the debris retrieved on Saturday was a seat with a serial number that matched the missing flight, a rucksack, and a case with an Air France ticket inside, rescue officials said. Air France has confirmed that the ticket corresponded to a passenger on board Flight 447.

Brazil's air force has been scouring a swathe of the Atlantic about 680 miles (1,100 km) northeast of Brazil's coast since Monday's crash.

Several Brazilian navy ships have also arrived in the area, but fears have grown that many bodies sank or were devoured by sharks.

The news came as it was revealed Air France had not replaced airspeed instruments on the plane as the maker Airbus recommended before it crashed in a storm with 228 people on board. The French accident investigation agency, BEA, found the doomed plane received inconsistent airspeed readings by different instruments as it struggled in a massive thunderstorm on its flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in the early hours of Monday morning.

Airbus had recommended to all its airline customers that they replace speed-measuring instruments known as Pitot tubes on the A330, the model used for Flight 447, said Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the agency.

'They hadn't yet been replaced' on the plane that crashed, said Alain Bouillard, head of the French investigation. Air France declined immediate comment.

Arslanian cautioned that it is too early to draw conclusions about the role of Pitot tubes in the crash, saying that 'it does not mean that without replacing the Pitots that the A330 was dangerous.' It also emerged today that the jet had issued 24 system failure messages before it crashed. Fourteen of those messages were sent within the space of one minute, from 3.10am BST to 3.11am BST, a briefing in Paris was told today. (Daily Mail)