Deep sea search parties have found one of two flight data recorders from an Air France flight that crashed off the coast of Brazil in 2009, investigators said on Sunday, reviving hopes of understanding what caused the crash, according to Reuters. French investigators said in a statement the flight data recorder, or black box, had been hauled up to the deck of a search boat. Pictures published on the website of France's BEA air accident inquiry office, before the box was pulled to the surface, show an orange cylindrical object half-buried in sand. Officials said it was too early to say whether the black box, which records data from the plane's instruments but no voices, would yield information about the cause of the crash. "One thing that's clear is that even if the box does not look damaged on the photograph, we cannot say whether it works until we have opened it up," a BEA spokeswoman told Reuters. "That requires very precise equipment and the analysis can only start in a Paris laboratory." She said search robots had already dived back to the Atlantic sea floor to try to locate the second black box, which contains voice and sound recordings from the cockpit. The discovery comes after long searches of a 10,000 square kilometre area of sea floor to locate the plane's two flight recorders, which investigators hope will settle a dispute over the cause of the crash. The Airbus 330-203 plane plunged into the Atlantic off the northeast coast of Brazil en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro in June 2009, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board after the flight hit stormy weather. Speculation about what caused the accident has focused on the possible icing up of the aircraft's speed sensors, which seemed to give inconsistent readings before communication was lost.
