AVIATION/ AIR FRANCE FL447 REPORT EXPECTED IN EARLY 2012

French Investigators have said they expect their report into the cause of the 2009 AIR FRANCE Flight 447 disaster over the Atlantic to be ready no sooner than early 2012. Speaking today in Paris, the BEA said it could take months to interpret data from the Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders, which were just recently recovered from the ocean floor. Nor, they added, was there any certainty it would be possible to determine what went wrong. "We hope to be able to read them, even though this isn't yet guaranteed," said Jean-Paul Troadec, the BEA's director, at the news conference in le Bourget, France. It would, he said, take at least 3 days to extract copies of the data, one for crash investigators and another for French prosecutors investigating the cause of the disaster, but months or longer to piece together what happened. The black boxes from the Airbus A330, preserved in demineralized water, were displayed for the media, pictured, before being taken away for examination. The jet's pitot tubes, which were initially linked to a possible cause of the crash, have not yet been found. Flight 447 went down on June 1, 2009, after running into an intense high-altitude thunderstorm, 4 hours into a flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris. All 228 passengers and crew onboard were killed in the crash. The wreckage of the plane was only recently discovered after a search of 3860 sq miles of sea floor. The remains of 2 people have been recovered since the wreck was found while those of 50 other victims were recovered shortly after the crash on the waters surface. The BEA said that only about 50 bodies remain at the crash site. The other bodies are probably lost forever. Meanwhile, judges in Paris said the remaining bodies may have to remain on the ocean floor. A court said that the dangers of the corpses degrading once they reached the surface were just too great. The court said the 2 bodies that were raised in the past week, after almost 2 years of being preserved in freezing cold water and under high pressure, began to disintegrate when they reached the surface. It led the judges to write a letter to victims’ family saying that: "To preserve their dignity and out of respect for the families who mourn them, the remains of those which are badly degraded will not be recovered. While tests are carried out on the 2 bodies which are already recovered to see if they can be identified, no others will be raised". A final decision once those test results are back.