A pilot discovered a defect with a smoke detector before leaving Dusseldorf Airport, in Germany.The Paris-bound flight went ahead as the technical fault was not enough to ground the aircraft. Technicians later found wires on the Airbus A318 had been sliced with a cutter, according to reports. Air France suspect a 'malicious act'.More than 400 pieces of Flight 447 have now been recovered after a painstaking search of the Atlantic.
'If we had concluded or excluded something, we would have told you,' said Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of the French air accident investigation agency BEA.He expressed 'a little more optimism' in finding clues to the cause of the crash as discovery of more debris narrowed the vast search zone off the north-east coast of Brazil.
The Air France Airbus A330 crashed into the ocean on May 31 after running into thunderstorms en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Speaking at BEA headquarters in the Le Bourget air field outside Paris, Arslanian said more than 400 pieces of wreckage have been recovered and are being gathered in a hangar in Recife, Brazil. He said the debris came from 'all zones' of the plane, but did not describe them in detail or say what proportion of the entire Airbus A330 has been retrieved.
Still missing are the plane's two black boxes, its flight data and voice recorders, thought to be deep under water. (Daily Mail)
