The investigation has focused on the inconsistent readings from its airspeed sensors. Ice-clogged probes could have confused the plane's flight computers and led the pilots to fly too fast or too slowly into a storm.
An Air France Flight #447 was a scheduled commercial flight from Rio de Janeiro Brazil, to Paris France, and crashed on June 1, 2009 into the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of all 216 passengers and 12 crew members.
The plane fell from the sky in mid-flight, something that almost never happens in modern aviation. The cause is still a mystery. Recovery experts say the equatorial Atlantic where the plane went down is an especially bad place for a plane crash.
The waters there, not far from where Atlantic hurricanes take shape, are often stormy and rough. And the ocean floor near the mid-Atlantic ridge is deep and uneven, worsening the chances of a full recovery.
It appears there were electrical malfunction issues about 4 hours into the flight. The Air France flight went missing after experiencing thunderstorms and turbulence somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.
The aircraft, an Air France Airbus A330-200, took off at 19:03 local time. The last contact with the crew was a routine message to Brazilian air traffic controllers at 01:33, as the aircraft approached the edge of Brazilian radar surveillance over the Atlantic Ocean, en-route to Senegalese-controlled airspace off the coast of West Africa.
Forty minutes later, a four-minute-long series of automatic radio messages was received from the airplane, indicating numerous problems and warnings. The exact meanings of these messages are still under investigation, but the aircraft is believed to have been lost shortly after it had sent the automated messages.
