Mourning begins for Air France crash victims

A memorial service for the victims was scheduled to be held later Wednesday in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, with President Nicolas Sarkozy and other government members to be in attendance.

Late Tuesday, the Brazilian government declared three days of mourning for the crash victims.

There were 72 French nationals, 60 Brazilians and 26 Germans among the plane's 216 passengers and crew of 12.

Meanwhile an investigation was formally opened into the world's worst commercial air disaster since 2001 after fragments found in the Atlantic Ocean were unofficially determined to have come from the Airbus A330-200 aircraft.

The investigation was opened just hours after Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim said there was "no doubt" that the debris discovered belonged to the Air France flight that vanished early Monday on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Officials of France's Office of Accident Investigations and Analyses (BEA), which is heading the inquiry, said Wednesday that the search for the cause of the crash would be long and difficult.

"This aviation catastrophe is the worst this country has ever suffered," BEA director Paul-Louis Arslanian told journalists in Paris. "We can not allow ourselves to speculate. We must verify everything." 

Arslanian said the accident occurred in the middle of the Atlantic, where the waters are very deep and the seafloor is very mountainous. This makes locating the sunken aircraft extremely difficult.

Arslanian was very clear about the first priority of the investigation. "We have to find the black boxes," he said.

Each plane carries two black boxes, a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, and they are essential in helping investigators in the painstaking search for the cause of a plane crash.

"I don't know what we will find. But we will immediately communicate everything we learn, as soon as it is clear to us," Arslanian said.

BEA investigator Alain Bouillard said that four teams of investigators have already begun work on the accident, which took place early Monday.

Meanwhile, the search for the wreckage of the aircraft continued. Captain Christophe Prazuck, of the French army chief of staff, said that Wednesday would be "a day of transition" in that search.

"We will move from an air operation covering a large zone to a naval operation over a restricted zone," he was quoted as saying by the online edition of the daily Le Figaro.

The merchant ships and navy vessels in the area will gather the debris floating on the surface before submarines are deployed in the coming weeks to search for the wreckage itself, he said.

In addition an AWACS surveillance plane will carry out a "cartography" of the debris in an attempt to determine the precise place where the aircraft crashed into the sea, to help in the eventual recovery of the plane's black boxes, Prazuck said.