Air France will pay families about ?17,500 ($24,500) in initial compensation for each victim of the crash of Flight 447 this month, the company's chief executive says. So far, Air France has been in touch with about 1,800 relatives of the people who died when the Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, chief executive Paul-Henri Gourgeon told France's RTL radio Friday. The company is also providing families with counseling, he said. "Of course, this is not ...

At least some of the bodies recovered from the Air France crash this month had broken bones, Brazilian authorities have told French investigators, evidence that suggests the flight broke apart before hitting the ocean. Paul-Louis Arslanian, director of the Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, the French accident investigation board, said Thursday that Brazilian medical examiners had given that information to his agency. Asked whether the information included reports that the recovered bodies from Flight 447 had fractures to arms, legs and ...

Amanda Knox has finally spoken. Ever since the 21-year-old American student was arrested in Italy in late 2007 and charged with the grisly murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic have bubbled with scandal and speculation. Was she, as Italian and British reports suggest, a promiscuous party girl who lived like a slob and took strange men back to the house? Did she, as Italian prosecutors allege, cut Kercher's throat after she ...

A New Mexico police officer was rescued Wednesday after surviving a helicopter crash in the snowy Santa Fe National Forest, but the fate of the pilot remained unknown. The simple fact is that the blizzard of airworthiness directives, company memos, weather reports, technical specifications and diverse other documents that have surfaced since last week constitute entirely circumstantial evidence. Aviation history is replete with accidents with causes utterly unrelated to what first seemed the obvious explanation. For the investigators, the challenge ...

There is a region of the world where the weather is always hot and humid and it rains almost every day of the year. Sounds predictable, right? But weather in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, can be volatile and dangerous. The Intertropical Convergence Zone, which circles the Earth near the equator, is where officials say Air France Flight 447 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. While weather has not been cited as a reason for the plane's crash, the tragedy ...

Air France Flight 447 sent out 24 automated error messages -- including one saying the aircraft's autopilot had disengaged -- before it vanished with 228 people on board, aviation investigators said Saturday. But even as they analyzed the error messages and satellite images of the doomed flight's path, investigators said they still have a lot of work to determine what caused the plane to go down. "I would just like to ask you to bear in mind that all of ...

Though searchers believe that they have found debris from an Air France jet that disappeared off Brazil's coast Monday, finding the entire plane and learning exactly what downed it could be a tedious, years-long process. Many factors can complicate a search effort. Tradewinds and ocean currents can quickly scatter wreckage across several square miles, and the plane's altitude -- almost 7 miles, in the case of Flight 447 -- can make it difficult to pin down where the aircraft hit ...

The mysterious disappearance of Flight AF 447 over the Atlantic Ocean has fueled speculation among aviation experts about what caused the state-of-the-art airliner to come down. According to Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the Airbus A330-200 encountered heavy turbulence about 02:15 a.m. local time Monday (10:15 p.m. ET Sunday), three hours after the jet carrying 228 people left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for Paris, France. At that point, the plane's automatic system initiated a four-minute exchange of messages to the ...

Brazilian and French rescue teams continued to search Tuesday for the passengers of an Air France jet that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean as details of Flight 447 began to emerge. The Airbus A330 encountered heavy turbulence about 02:15 a.m. local time Monday (10:15 p.m. ET Sunday), some three hours after the jet carrying 228 people left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for Paris, France, on an 11-hour flight, according to Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon. At that point, the plane's ...

Today's not only the first of the month or the start of the summer season meteorologically: It's the first day of hurricane season 2009. On this day, forecasters often begin speculating about when the season's first storm will form in the Atlantic. There's no need to wonder about that this year, because there's already been a tropical depression -- before the official season even began. On Thursday, Tropical Depression One formed in the Atlantic about 310 miles south of ...