Air France jet was intact before crash

LE BOURGET, France, July 2 (UPI) -- The Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean was not destroyed in flight nor did it break up, the French air investigation agency said Thursday.

"The plane went straight down, almost vertically, toward the surface of the water, very, very fast," air accident investigator Alain Bouillard of France's Bureau of Inquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety, or BEA, said of Flight 447.

The flight went down in a violent thunderstorm June 1 more than 600 miles off the coast of northern Brazil during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew members.

The Airbus A330 "did not break up or become destroyed in flight," he said in a preliminary report to journalists at BEA headquarters at Le Bourget, outside Paris.

The plane was unable to fly on autopilot at the time of the crash because the autopilot was not receiving speed, wind or direction information, Bouillard said.

"These tell us that the plane has to be, in this case, directed by the pilot," he said.

Brazilian and French naval recovery teams continue to trawl the seas near the presumed crash zone for the plane's "black boxes," the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, which investigators say could contain critical clues to explain the accident.

The search gains urgency with each passing day because a recorder is designed to emit electronic beacon signals for only around 30 days. Once that deadline passes, the chances of finding a black box drop considerably, aviation experts say.

Investigators plan to search until July 10, CNN quoted Bouillard as saying.

The accident was the deadliest in Air France history, surpassing the crash of an Air France charter flight from Paris to Atlanta June 3, 1962, that killed 130 people and was the airline's first fatal crash since Concorde Flight 4590 from Paris to New York July 25, 2000, that killed 109.