Search for Air France Flight 447 black box to continue till July 10

In the press briefings held by the BEA the investigators revealed that they believe the flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean intact.

Through examining the damage on the wreckage, the investigation now believe that the plane did not break up mid air but was in one piece as it crashed into the ocean.

The flight hit the water belly first but was gathering speed as it fell thousands of feet from the sky.

Alain Bouillard, who is leading the investigation into the June 1 crash for the French accident agency BEA, said the sensors, called Pitot tubes, were "a factor but not the only one."

"It is an element but not the cause," Bouillard told the news conference in Paris. "Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident."

"Between the surface of the water and 35,000 feet, we don't know what happened," Bouillard accepted. "In the absence of the flight recorders [black boxes], it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions."

The investigators said the search for the black box will continue at least till 10 July.

The BEA published the interim report on the findings but said by no means the inference made so far are final and are expected to evolve as more information is gathered. The autopsy results have not yet been formally handed over to the French investigation team by the Brazilian authorities.

The Brazilian navy called off the search for the bodies on June 26 following nine days of search without locating any more bodies or wreckage.

The French navy has kept their vessels to aid the hunt for the elusive flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder (commonly known as the black boxes).

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The black box continuously emits locator signals called "pinger" for up to 30 days. This acoustic (sonar) signals can be picked up by underwater listening or acoustic systems.

In the quest for the black box, France has deployed the hunter killer submarine "Emeraude" to complete the acoustic search system.

The interim report states that the BEA approached the U.S navy for its two powerful underwater pinger locator hydrophones which the U.S navy uses regularly for military and civil plane crashes at sea.

The pinger locators can detect signals up to 2km on average and can be submerged up to 6km.

Two ships were chartered by the BEA to optimise the use of the pinger locators from the Dutch company Louis Dreyfus Armateurs, the two tug ships are named as the "Fairmount Expedition" and the "Fairmount Glacier".

To further assist the search of the black box over an area that has some of the most rugged under sea mountain ranges in the world, the BEA contracted the oceanographic ship "Pourquoi Pas ?" from IFREMER (the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea). The ship comes with two specialized exploration and intervention tools, the Nautile submarine and the Victor 6000 ROV. These equipments can operate up to six thousand meters deep and also map the accident site.

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