The mystery surrounding the crash of an Air France plane off the coast of Brazil deepened Friday after Brazilian officials said items they had pulled from the sea were not in fact debris from the downed Airbus. The search by ships for wreckage from Air France flight AF 477, which came down early Monday as it was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board, continued in a zone where confirmed items from the plane had been spotted earlier in the week. “Up to now, no material from the plane has been recovered,” Brigadier Ramon Cardoso, director of Brazilian air traffic control, told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife late Thursday. That contradicted a statement Cardoso made earlier Thursday when he said a palette and two buoys plucked from the Atlantic by navy crews were the first pieces of the Air France crash. In fact, Cardoso admitted later, they were nothing more than sea “trash,” probably from a ship, as was a big oil patch originally described as a fuel slick from the French jet. French Defense Minister Herve Morin said Friday France will send a nuclear submarine to help find the Air France jet. “Thanks to its surveillance equipment it could help us find the black boxes (flight data recorders),” he told reporters, adding that the vessel would be a nuclear hunter-killer submarine. A French marine research ship equipped with two non-nuclear mini-submarines is already on its way to the stretch of the Atlantic where the Airbus A330 is thought to have crashed Monday. Several Brazilian navy vessels are looking for debris from the plane, including a seat and a big chunk of what appeared to be fuselage, sighted by air force aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday. The French government, which is in charge of the probe into the crash, has sent investigators to Brazil to inspect any debris that could be recovered from the zone, around 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) off-shore, and take them back to France. Speculation over what caused the accident has ranged from a massive, lightning-packed storm in the area at the time, to turbulence, to pilot error or a combination of factors. No mayday call was received from the plane, just a series of data transmissions signaling it had lost power.
