Structural Rupture Now Being Considered on Air France Flight

PARIS, France (CNN) -- At least some of the bodies recovered from the Air France crash this month had broken bones, Brazilian authorities have told French investigators, evidence that suggests the flight broke apart before hitting the ocean.

Paul-Louis Arslanian, director of the Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, the French accident investigation board, said Thursday that Brazilian medical examiners had given that information to his agency.

Asked whether the information included reports that the recovered bodies from Flight 447 had fractures to arms, legs and hips, and few had any clothing, Arslanian said yes.

All of that, aviation experts have said, points to a mid-air rupture of the plane at about 35,000 feet.

There is still no explanation of what brought down the Airbus A330, which was en route from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France when it crashed in the Atlantic on June 1.

Arslanian pleaded Thursday for the media and the public to stop speculation about the cause of the Air France crash.

A major Brazilian newspaper reported this week that 95 percent of the bodies so far had shown fractures in the legs, arms and hips similar to injuries found in people who fall from great heights. The newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo cited unnamed officials who are part of the investigation.

Another clue is the low incidence of cranial trauma, the newspaper reported. If the aircraft had nose-dived into the ocean, victims would have more head injuries, the paper said.

A large number of bodies also had red lesions in their mucous membranes, which the paper said is usually associated with asphyxia, or lack of oxygen.

Another major Brazilian newspaper, the Jornal do Brasil, cited information from an unnamed person from the Brazilian military who has access to the teams working in the recovery of the plane. This person told the paper that bodies were found "mutilated" with no clothing, a strong indication of violent depressurization caused by a structural rupture.

More Bodies Found From Missing Air France Plane

RECIFE, Brazil (CNN) -- Three more bodies were found Sunday from the Air France plane that went missing off the coast of Brazil nearly a week ago, Brazilian officials said.

The discovery brings to five the number of bodies found from the flight AF447, which was carrying 228 passengers and crew when it vanished on Monday.

On Saturday, a Brazilian navy frigate transported the bodies of two men -- south of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archpelago.

Brazilian air force and navy officials said it was not possible to identify the sex of the latest three bodies. Asked their condition, the officials declined to describe them, citing good taste and the victims' families.

All the bodies and items are confirmed as being from Air France 447, which vanished over the Atlantic early Monday en route to Paris, France, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The items recovered include parts of the plane's wing section and at least two seats from the plane and many more items of luggage, officials said.

The area where the bodies and crash debris are being found is about 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) from the Brazilian coast.

Bodies and debris from the aircraft will be taken to the coastal city of Recife for formal identification and forensic examination, officials said.

Brazilian authorities said the investigation into the cause of the crash would be handled by Air France and by French authorities. Once everything is brought to the mainland, the French investigators will examine the items.

The Brazilian officials said their first priority is to recover as many bodies as possible, in order to return them to the victim's families. They also want to recover luggage items and aircraft pieces to aid in the crash probe.

The discovery of the bodies Saturday provided a sliver ofhope to anxious relatives awaiting news.

"When I heard about this accident, they told us there were no bodies, no pieces of the plane," Nelson Faria Marinho, the father of a missing passenger, told Globo News television in Rio de Janeiro.

"Now, it's all surfacing. We have pieces of the airplane. We have bodies. This renews my hope. As a father, I can't think of the worst. I couldn't."

Also found Saturday were a backpack and a leather briefcase containing an airplane ticket with a reservation code, which Air France verified belonged to a passenger on the jet, another air force spokesman, Jorge Amaral, told CNN.

The Brazilian navy and air force officials said the backpack contained a laptop, and an oxygen mask also was discovered.

The search area covers 200,000 square kilometers (77,220 square miles).

It is not clear where the plane crashed, since ocean currents likely caused the bodies and debris to drift in the six days since the crash.

Recovery of bodies and debris is significant not only for families, but for crash investigators, said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation.

"Even if they don't find anything else they can get some very important clues from the pieces that they do find and from the human remains," Schiavo told CNN Saturday.

She said investigators would be able to discern if there was an explosion from possible residue on the bodies or other items. Or, if water is found in the lungs of victims, investigators would know the plane went down intact, she said.

Investigators in Paris said Saturday that the Air France flight sent out 24 automated error messages lasting about four minutes before it crashed.

The error messages suggest the plane may have been flying too fast or too slow through severe thunderstorms it encountered before the crash, officials said.

Schiavo, the former inspector general, said the four minutes of automated signals sent from the plane "was a very long time."

Investigators also reported that the airline had failed to replace a part, as recommended by the manufacturer, Airbus.

Airbus had advised airlines to update equipment that monitors speed, known as Pitot tubes. The recommendation was a result of technological developments and improvements, an Airbus spokesman told CNN's Richard Quest. The change was not mandatory, and the spokesman would not comment on Air France's failure to follow the advice.

But investigators said a lot of work remains to be done to determine why the plane crashed.

Body From Air France Crash Found, Brazil Says

PARIS, France (CNN) -- The bodies of two men, one of whom was confirmed to be a passenger from the Air France plane that crashed Monday, were found early Saturday, a Brazilian air force spokesman said.

Also found were a backpack and a leather briefcase containing an airplane ticket with a reservation code, which Air France verified belonged to a passenger on the jet, Jorge Amaral said.

The Brazilian navy and air force said the backpack contained a laptop, and an oxygen mask also was discovered, the Brazilian navy and air force said.

Air force officials announced the news in Recife, Brazil. The items were discovered 420 miles north of the Fernando de Noronha islands, 220 miles (355 kilometers) off the northeast coast of Brazil.

All 228 passengers and crew aboard the Airbus 330 are presumed to have died when the plane disappeared northeast of the islands.

The flight originated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was en route to Paris, France.

Search teams were still trying to find debris from the jet Saturday, two days after an air force official said debris plucked from the ocean was not from the Air France jet.

Earlier Saturday, aviation investigators said Flight 447 sent out 24 automated error messages, including one saying the aircraft's autopilot had disengaged, before it vanished with 228 people on board.

They also reported that the airline had failed to replace a part, as recommended by the manufacturer, Airbus.

Airbus had advised airlines to update equipment that monitors speed, known as Pitot tubes. The recommendation was a result of technological developments and improvements, an Airbus spokesman told CNN's Richard Quest. The change was not mandatory, and the spokesman would not comment on Air France's failure to follow the advice.

Planes have crashed because of faulty or blocked Pitot tubes in the past, Quest said, and there was clearly something wrong with the doomed plane's speed-monitoring equipment.

But it may be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the Pitot tubes, he added, as the jet apparently was experiencing massive system failures.

Even as they analyzed the error messages and satellite images of the doomed flight's path, investigators said they still have a lot of work to determine what caused the plane to go down.

"I would just like to ask you to bear in mind that all of this is dynamic and there are a lot of question marks," said Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of France's accident investigation bureau.

"We don't know how the aircraft entered the water. We don't know how these pieces of debris entered into the water and that you have to take into account the current ... and the shape of the ocean floor."

The error messages suggest that the plane may have been flying too fast or too slow through the stormy weather it encountered before the crash, officials said.

In addition, investigators have said the plane's autopilot disengaged, cabin pressure was lost, and there was an electrical failure before the disaster.

The jet's manufacturer, Airbus, sent a Telex to operators of Airbus models reminding them of what to do when speed indicators give conflicting readings.

The spokesman said the notice does not mean there is any major flaw in the aircraft but is simply a reminder to pilots of what to do in the cockpit if they get conflicting information about air speed.

Flight 447 Crash Could Join List of Mysteries

(CNN) -- As the possibility decreases that investigators will learn what happened to Air France Flight 447 on Monday over the Atlantic Ocean, the chances of it entering the folklore of mystery crashes grows.

Brazilian air force officials still have not identified debris from the Airbus A330, and a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board official said currents would be scattering any debris from the flight over an increasing area, reducing the probability of finding the jetliner's voice and flight data recorders.

Experts said lack of answers about what happened to Flight 447 could give it a lasting place in the public consciousness, like TWA Flight 800.

Flight 800, headed to Paris, France, from New York, crashed into the Atlantic off Long Island in 1996, killing all 230 people aboard. Initially speculating that the plane was the target of a terrorist attack, the NTSB in 2000 released a report citing a short circuit around the center wing fuel tank as the probable cause.

The exact cause still has not been determined, and several other explanations have been offered over the years.

Clint V. Oster Jr., a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, said that while the public may more readily process a single explanation, the reality is that many crashes are the result of compound difficulties.

"Many crashes don't have a single cause, but rather are the result of a complex sequence of events involving multiple failures. Understanding how these multiple factors interacted to cause the crash can be difficult," said Oster, co-author of "Why Airplanes Crash: Aviation Safety in a Changing World."

Pilot and author Phaedra Hise of Richmond, Virginia, said a love of mysteries multiplied by the fact that air travel still captivates the public keeps fascination high.

"If [John F. Kennedy Jr.] had died in a car crash, there would not be the same level of fascination. Aviation for a lot of people is still pretty magical," said Hise, author of "Anatomy of a Plane Crash."

"If you don't know how [a plane] works, it's pretty magical; this huge thing takes flight. It's just a big mystery. There's a lot of romance with that, a lot of drama," Hise said. "The people who fly them are considered brave and have a lot of heart. And people just don't understand, so many people just don't understand, how airplanes work."

A number of unsolved plane crashes have remained in the public psyche for years:

One of the most famous was that of aviator Amelia Earhart, whose twin-engine Lockheed Electra vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 while on a round-the-world flight. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were never heard from again.

Because of the social intrigue, theories -- and conspiracies -- related to Earhart's disappearance have become legend.

None of course ranks as high in mystery as the Bermuda Triangle, a cone-shaped vicinity extending northward from Puerto Rico to about halfway up the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. Its origins come from the loss of Flight 19, a team of five Navy bombers that vanished in 1945 after getting disoriented and confused about its coordinates.

More recently, South African Airways Flight 295, a Boeing 747 en route to Johannesburg from Taiwan in 1987, crashed into the Indian Ocean shortly after the pilot reported smoke in the cabin. While debris that washed up on the shores of Madagascar was tested, the cause of the crash has never been positively established.

In 1994, U.S. Air Flight 427 crashed in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, after taking off in Chicago, Illinois, en route to West Palm Beach, Florida. While federal officials identified a problem with the rudder but could not explain why the plane suddenly flipped and crashed, not a single clue has revealed why the mechanism failed. All 132 people aboard died.

Golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet crashed in 1999. Although federal investigators revealed that the cabin air system lost pressure, it still has not been determined why. The pilots reportedly lost contact with air traffic controllers about 15 minutes into the flight. The investigation uncovered that the jet flew a straight course until it ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota.

In January 2008, a British Airways Boeing 777 crashed short of the runway at Heathrow Airport in London, England. Nineteen of the 152 people aboard were injured. There still is no explanation for why the plane's engines lost power.

"The one that fascinates me is Steve Fossett," said Hise."I have absolutely no idea what happened to that man."

Fossett, an adventurer famous for being the first person to complete a solo balloon flight around the world, was reported missing over Nevada in September 2007. Months after investigators searched for his body, his widow, in February 2008, requested that he be declared legally dead. His bones, found more than a half-mile from where his plane wreckage was discovered, were positively identified later that year.

"He was flying in clear skies, in an area he was familiar with. That's the one that kind of eats away at me," Hise said.

With all the mystery, David M. Primo, associate professor of political science at the University of Rochester, said there's a broader effect when investigations fail to find clues about how an aircraft go down.

"An unsolved crash has the effect of creating an erroneous perception that flying is unsafe, even though it is a remarkably safe form of travel," said Primo, co-author of "The Plane Truth: Airline Crashes, The Media and Transportation Policy."

The odds of dying in a domestic plane crash are one in 70 million, according to MIT statistician Arnold Barnett, who has performed analyses for the Federal Aviation Administration.