The Brazilian Air Force said Sunday that three more bodies had been recovered from the Air France plane that plunged into the Atlantic with 228 people on board, according to dpa. An Air Force spokesman, Henry Munhoz, announced the find in Recife a day after the first two bodies - those of two male passengers - had been taken out of the sea by Brazilian navy searchers. The gender of the three bodies recovered Sunday was not immediately disclosed. All five bodies were being transported to the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha for examination. Munhoz said other bodies and hundreds of objects had been sighted in the area, about 1,200 kilometres north-east of the Brazilian coastline, and that the priority was to recover the victims. There was "no doubt" that the debris and the bodies came from the missing plane, he said. Many personal items have also been recovered from the sea, including a leather suitcase, a backpack containing a laptop, and a ticket for the fatal flight AF 447. But the spokesman refuted French media reports that one of the two male bodies recovered Saturday had been strapped into his seat when he was found. An intensive search for the other victims and for the plane itself is now underway in the area involving 14 aircraft and seven ships. The airliner, an Airbus A330-200, disappeared mysteriously early Monday on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Investigators looking into the crash were concentrating on a series of inconsistent airspeed readings sent by the plane in the final minutes of its flight, French Junior Minister for Transport Dominique Bussereau said Sunday. "This series of readings (represent) the only real element for investigators at this moment," Bussereau told RTL radio. One of the paths being followed is the behaviour of a device called a Pitot tube, which provides information over ambient air pressure and therefore aids in measuring the airspeed of an aircraft. "There have been situations on Airbus planes, and perhaps on others, where these tubes no longer indicated the airspeed because it entered a humid area, a low-pressure area, an area of turbulence," Bussereau said. As a result, the pilots would be looking at an erroneous airspeed reading, which could provoke two disastrous consequences - the plane is flying too slowly or it is flying too fast. If a plane flies too slowly, it could stall in mid-air, Bussereau said. If it flies too fast, it could disintegrate "because it would be approaching the speed of sound and the plane's outer covering is not made to withstand such speeds," he said. However, Bussereau insisted that "no hypothesis could yet be privileged" as to why the Airbus 330-200 fell into the Atlantic early Monday. Air France said Sunday it was speeding up the planned replacement of all Pitot tubes on its entire fleet of A330 and A340 planes.
