Air France 447 - Body of Pilot of Doomed Air France Flight Identified
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PARIS — Medical examiners in Brazil have identified the bodies of the captain and a flight attendant of Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean earlier this month, Air France said Thursday.
The two male members of the 12-person flight crew are among 49 bodies that have been retrieved from the sea in the search for wreckage and the remains of the 228 victims of the June 1 crash.
The airline did not release the names of the two crew members, but a pilots union representative identified the captain as Marc Dubois, a 58-year-old Frenchman and 21-year veteran of the airline.
This week, the international police agency Interpol said that 11 of the victims had been positively identified using dental and medical records, fingerprints and DNA data: eight Brazilians, one Brazilian-German dual national, one Brazilian-Swiss dual national and one British national. Germany’s foreign ministry has also said that three Germans have also been identified.
Separately, the French agency charged with investigating the crash said that it planned to publish a preliminary report on the accident on July 2.
The Airbus A330 went down in a violent thunderstorm more than 600 miles off the coast of northern Brazil during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Brazilian and French naval recovery teams continue to trawl the seas near the presumed crash zone for the plane’s so-called “black box,” the flight data and cockpit voice recorder that investigators say could contain critical clues to explain the accident.
The search for the black box gains urgency with each passing day because the they are designed to emit electronic beacon signals for only around 30 days. Once that deadline passes, the chances of finding the black box drop considerably, crash investigators have said.
