The Air France Airbus A330-200 that crashed into the Atlantic one month ago did not break up in flight, dpa cited an official with the French Office of Accident Investigation (BEA) as saying today at Le Bourget airport near Paris. Alain Bouillard, who is in charge of the investigation, said an analysis of the fragments of the plane that have been recovered suggests that "the plane seems to have hit the surface of the water in the line of flight with a strong vertical acceleration." This conclusion appears to eliminate the possibility that a terrorist bomb caused the crash of flight AF 447, which plunged into the Atlantic in the early hours of June 1, killing all 228 people aboard. Terrorism had been considered a possible cause of the accident because the pilot of the Air France plane did not send any distress signal before the plane vanished while on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. "We found no traces of fire or explosives," Bouillard said. It was not known if the cabin was still pressurized or if the passengers were still alive when the aircraft struck the water. The statements were part of the first interim report on the crash made public by the BEA since the accident. Investigators also found that it took hours to determine that the plane had disappeared because no flight plan had been sent to the flight control station in Dakar, Senegal, and therefore control of the plane's flight could not be transferred from Brazil. Bouillard said that weather conditions were "classic" for the time of year in the equatorial region, with a number of "storm cells" in the area that required planes to change their flight paths by 20 to 150 kilometers to avoid turbulence. He said that the cause of the crash will be easier to determine when the plane's black boxes are found, and that the search for the black boxes would continue. The black boxes - a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder - emit signals for at least 30 days after a crash. That period expired on Wednesday. However, Bouillard said he was confident that they would be found. So far, searchers have recovered 640 fragments of the aircraft and 51 bodies. Bouillard said he regretted the fact that French authorities have received no information about the results of the autopsies on the recovered victims.
