Paris - A French nuclear-powered submarine has begun looking for the Air France plane that plunged into the Atlantic last week with 228 people on board, a French military spokesman said Wednesday. Christophe Prazuck told France Info radio that the Emeraude will use its sophisticated sonar equipment to search the ocean floor for the aircraft, and especially its two black boxes, which contain vital information about why it crashed.
"The boat will search an area of about 36 kilometers by 36 kilometres every day, covering each section of ocean floor in tight swathes, to try and detect the signal from the black boxes, if they are still emitting them," Prazuck said.
Black boxes are equipped with beacons that produce an ultrasonic signal for 30 days after an accident.
"Our chances of success are not very, very high," Prazuck said.
One possibility is that the boxes were separated from the beacons by the force of the crash, which could mean that the boxes were lost forever and that the cause of the accident may never be determined.
As the search continued for the airplane, which disappeared early June 1 during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, investigators continued looking for clues to the cause of the accident.
The online edition of the weekly L'Express reported Wednesday that French intelligence services were checking two passengers with names that have been connected with Islamic terrorists.
Investigators have still not ruled out terrorism as a cause of the accident, but they believe it is unlikely because of the series of failure signals sent automatically by the plane in the final minutes of its flight.
Satellite photographs suggest that the aircraft encountered a very violent storm, in which temperatures fell to below minus 80 degrees centigrade.
Meanwhile, recovery teams pulled an additional 17 bodies out of the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil on Tuesday, bringing the total number of bodies retrieved after last week's crash to 41.
The airliner, travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed into the ocean about 1,300 kilometres north-east of Brazil's coastline, in a region beset by rough seas and tumultuous storms, which have hindered recovery efforts.
