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French: Air France plane hit sea vertically
Air France Flight 447 plunged vertically into the Atlantic Ocean intact at a very high speed, a top French investigator said Thursday, adding that problems with the plane's speed sensors were not the direct cause of the crash.
Alain Bouillard, who is leading the investigation into the June 1 crash for the French accident agency BEA, says the sensors, called Pitot tubes, were "a factor but not the only one."
"It is an element but not the cause," Bouillard told a news conference in Le Bourget outside Paris. "Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident."
The Airbus A330-200 plane flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down with 228 people on board in a remote area of the Atlantic, 930 miles off Brazil's mainland and far from radar coverage.
The BEA released its first preliminary findings on the crash Thursday, calling it one of history's most challenging plane crash investigations.
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