Air France: Families to get $24,500

PARIS, June 20 (UPI) -- Victims' families will receive $24,500 apiece in compensation from Air France for this month's crash of Flight 447, a company official says.

Air France Chief Executive Paul-Henri Gourgeon told France's RTL radio Friday the payments will be made in an initial effort to compensate the loved ones of the 228 victims of the June 1 crash off the coast of Brazil, CNN reported.

"Of course, this is not always easy, (but) we make up for it," Gourgeon said. "We have psychologists in each country, in each stop. You know that the passengers were of 32 different nationalities, so all that is of great complexity, but we have the ability to manage this complexity. It's just a question of means and no limits on the means that we put in place."

Gourgeon told RTL it's proving to be a challenge tracking down relatives of the all the crash victims, CNN said.

"The modern world is different and we often have only a cell phone, and as you can imagine, this cell phone is unfortunately in the aircraft," the CEO said. "So we probably put more hours to access all the relatives."