10:14am UK, Tuesday June 09, 2009

A Brazilian navy ship has pulled the tail fin of Air France Flight AF447 from the Atlantic Ocean as officials prepare to identify the first of the bodies recovered.

The Brazilian navy with the Air France tail fin, stripes still visible

The discovery of the tail section is key for search teams as it could help locate the black boxes and determine why the jet went down over a week ago.

In a photo released by the Brazilian navy, Air France‘s blue-and-red stripes were visible, it was still in its original triangular shape and was not visibly burned.

Meanwhile, eight more bodies have been found at the crash site, some 700 miles off Brazil’s coast.

It brings the total recovered to 24 since the flight disappeared with 228 people on board, according to the Brazilian Air Force.

French officials said that at least another five bodies had been recovered by a French frigate helping the Brazilian navy recovery operation.

A navy ship will bring the bodies close to Brazil’s Fernando de Noronha archipelago, where they will to be transferred by helicopter today.

From there, they will be flown by plane to Recife, a mainland coastal city where a morgue has been set up to identify the remains using DNA samples from relatives and dental records.

The discovery of the plane’s fin could narrow the underwater search for the black boxes mounted in the tail section.

Time is running out to locate the devices, believed to be lying on the sea floor at a depth of up to 3.7 miles, as their homing beacons will cease to operate in three weeks.

The US navy said the first of two towable pinger locators would arrive on Wednesday, while a French submarine will conduct an underwater sweep.

If the black boxes are found, a French research sub – the same one used to explore the wreck of the Titanic – will be deployed to recover them.

Early suspicions are focusing on the Airbus A330′s airspeed sensors, which appear to have malfunctioned in the minutes before the catastrophe according to some of the 24 automatic data warnings sent by the plane.

Investigators are looking at whether the sensors could have iced over, possibly leading the Air France pilots to fly into a storm without knowing their airspeed.

French transport minister Dominique Bussereau said the scenario could have resulted in “too low a speed, which can cause it to stall, or too high a speed which can lead to the plane ripping up as it approached the speed of sound, as the outer skin is not designed to resist such speed”.

Air France said it would replace the airspeed sensors, known as Pitot tubes, on all its Airbus planes, but did not give any timeframe for the changes.

In an internal memo, pilots were urged to refuse to fly unless at least two of the three sensors on the planes had been replaced.