The World

摘要

On June 2, search teams combing the Atlantic Ocean discovered bobbing wreckage from the Air France jet that vanished between Brazil and West Africa two days earlier. But the mystery of why the Airbus A330 went down may endure-a lead investigator suggested that the doomed aircraft's voice and data recorders may never be plucked from the mountainous ocean floor, more than a mile below. Meteorologists suspect the wide-body jet encountered a band of towering thunderstorms packing 100-m.p.h. (160 km/h) winds as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, but the precise cause of the catastrophe remained unknown. All 228 people aboard the airliner are presumed dead, making this the deadliest crash in Air France's history and the world's worst civil-aviation disaster since 200I.