Cause of Air France crash elusive

WASHINGTON, July 13 (UPI) -- Evidence from the crash of Air France Flight 447 has yielded a surprising amount of clues, but investigators have not determined a cause, U.S. analysts say.

The June 1 crash of the Airbus A330 in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil killed 228 people, and a remarkable amount of information has been gleaned from the discovery of 50 bodies, floating remnants of the plane and batches of computer messages, USA Today reported Monday.

But without the plane's two "black box" flight data recorders, thought to be more than 10,000 feet underwater, the French Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, or BEA, will be extremely hard-pressed to definitively pinpoint a cause of the crash, experts said.

"Rarely is it like finding the smoking gun," Kevin Darcy, a consultant who formerly served as Boeing's accident investigation chief, told the newspaper. "It's more like police work in general, where there's a lot of mundane stuff that you go through and among that a pattern starts to emerge."

"They are going to find (the black boxes)," added John Fish, a sonar expert who has helped recover underwater aircraft wreckage. "It's just going to take longer because it is in deeper water."