Air France flight crashed into Atlantic vertically, says report

PARIS: The Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean last month, killing all 228 people on board plunged vertically from the sky so suddenly that passengers and crew on board did not even have time to inflate their life jackets.

A media report quoted investigators as saying that the Airbus "descended vertically" and dropped 35,000 feet in a matter of seconds, hitting the water in its exact flying position.

The details of the last moments of Flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1 were disclosed in an official report into the disaster released in the French capital.

The report also found that the plane had not broken up in mid-air, as had initially been thought.

Alain Bouillard, the chief accident investigator, said: "The plane was not destroyed while in flight. It appears to have hit the surface of the water in its flying position with a strong vertical acceleration."

Bouillard said uninflated life jackets were found all over the crash scene in the Atlantic soon after the crash.

The Airbus A330-200 went down within 930 miles off Brazil's mainland and far from radar coverage.

Bouillard also said the plane's defective airspeed sensors were a "factor but not the cause" of the crash.

Experts have suggested these external instruments might have iced over. Air France has now replaced the monitors, called Pitot tubes, on all its Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft.