Bodies found 2 years after French air crash, minister says

Richard Quest: What do investigators hope to learn from wreckage of missing Air France jet?

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: The data recorders have not been found, so "it's still a jigsaw puzzle," an investigator says
• The bodies will be brought to the surface and identified, a French official says
• The plane went down while flying from Brazil to France in 2009
• The cause of the crash remains unknown

Bodies from an Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean nearly two years ago have been found along with the wreckage of the plane, a French government minister said Monday.
They will be brought to the surface and identified, Ecology and Transportation Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said in a news conference.
But the flight data recorders still have not been recovered, leaving investigators as puzzled as ever about why the plane dropped out of the sky in stormy weather on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people aboard.
"It's still a jigsaw puzzle," said Alain Bouillard, who will be in charge of the recovery operation. "We do not know where the recorders might be."

It is impossible to tell how many bodies remain in the wreck, he added. Only 50 bodies were recovered in previous searches, leaving 178 victims still missing.
He would not comment on the condition of the bodies, calling it "inappropriate" to discuss.
The debris is dispersed over "quite a compact area," he said.
All the wreckage will be brought to the surface and sent to France for study, said Jean-Paul Troadec, the head of the French air accident investigation agency, the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses (BEA).
"We want to know what happened in this accident, most particularly so it never happens again," he said.
Investigators announced Sunday that they had found pieces the Airbus A330-200 that disappeared while flying to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.
After three unsuccessful searches, investigators found the wreckage by using "a different calculation based on currents of the sea and what might have happened," Troadec said Monday.
The BEA said Sunday that a team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution discovered parts during an underwater search operation conducted within the previous 24 hours.
Studies of the debris and bodies found after the crash led the BEA to conclude the plane hit the water belly first, essentially intact. Oxygen masks were not deployed, indicating that the cabin did not depressurize, the agency said in a 2009 report.
Automated messages sent from the plane in the minutes before the crash showed there were problems measuring air speed, investigators have said, though they said that alone was not enough to cause the disaster.

The area where the plane went down is far out in the Atlantic -- two to four days for ships to reach from the nearest ports in Brazil or Senegal in West Africa. The underwater terrain is rough with underwater mountains and valleys, the BEA has said.