Plane With 170 Aboard Crashes in Brazil

(NEWSER) - Brazil's Navy and Air Force gave up their search for Air France Flight 447 victims today, citing the difficulty of finding bodies and wreckage 25 days after the crash, Reuters reports. "It's already been nine days without seeing any bodies," a Brazilian officer said. French ships will remain, seeking black boxes that may help solve the mystery of the crash. Fifty-one bodies and 600 pieces of wreckage have been recovered so far. More»

Submarine sent to probe ocean floor

(NEWSER) - Rescuers are hot on the track of signals picked up deep in the Atlantic that could be from one of Air France Flight 447's black boxes, Le Monde reported today, but a French official denied that the signals could be originating from the doomed plane's flight recorder. “The black boxes have not been detected,” the official tells the AP. While Le Monde says a submarine was sent to investigate, a source tells Reuters it wasn’t “the first time sounds had been heard.” More»

(AP) - Bodies recovered in the Air France disaster show multiple fractures in the legs, hips, and arms, a Brazilian official said today. Experts said such injuries suggest the plane broke up in the air, and a spokesman for Brazilian medical examiners said autopsies on some of the 50 bodies recovered so far showed the fractures. More»

(NEWSER) - An Italian woman who cheated fate when she missed her flight on the doomed Air France jet has been killed in a car crash, the London Times reports. Johanna Ganthaler and her husband were late to the Rio airport on May 31 and caught another flight the next day. The two then traveled to Austria, where their car collided with an oncoming truck. Her husband was seriously injured. More»

(NEWSER) - A French airline-workers union has urged Air France crews to boycott long-haul Airbus jets until new speed sensors are installed, the Times of London reports. “To prevent a repeat” of the Flight 447 disaster, the Alter union said, “we call on flight deck and cabin crew to refuse all flights aboard the A330 and A340 series which have not been modified.” Alter represents 10% of Air France crews. More»