RIO DE JANEIRO, Wednesday

Brazilian navy divers rushed today to reach the wreckage of an Air France jet and start pulling debris from the Atlantic Ocean, where the plane with 228 people went down in the airline’s worst disaster in its 75-year history.

Four navy ships with recovery equipment and a tanker were headed to a 5km strip of water strewn with plane seats, an orange buoy, wiring, hunks of metal and jet fuel stains about 745 miles (1,200 km) northeast of the coastal city of Recife.

Rear Admiral Domingos Nogueira said the navy was battling tough weather as officials predicted the hardest task would be finding the flight data and voice recorders that hold clues to why the plane fell out of the sky during a severe storm in the middle of the night.

Distraught relatives who had prayed for a miracle gave up hope as experts were certain that all aboard died on the flight, which left Rio de Janeiro on Sunday night bound for Paris. "I just want to find my son’s body so that he can have a dignified burial," said Aldair Gomes, the father of Marcelo Parente, who was the head of the Rio mayor’s cabinet.

So far no bodies have been sighted on flyovers by the air force, which spotted evidence of the catastrophe on Tuesday, allowing the navy to mount a retrieval operation.

Ships equipped

"The ships are equipped to arrive and pick up pieces of the Airbus," Nogueira said. "Each ship has two divers on board and smaller ships to throw into the ocean to try and get pieces."

Helicopters would then be used to take wreckage of the Airbus A330 from the ships to a base on the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 430 miles (700 km) from the crash site.

Today, armed forces spokesman Christophe Prazuck told Reuters that the French army had no doubt that the debris belonged to the stricken plane.

Homing signals

Officials said the recorders needed to identify the causes of the mysterious crash could be on the ocean floor at a depth of 6,600 to 9,800 feet (2,000 to 3,000 metres).

The recorders are designed to send homing signals for up to 30 days when they hit water.

One expert said it could be among the hardest recoveries since the decades-long search to find the Titanic.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he was confident that the black boxes would be

Authorities were at a loss to explain how a storm could have caused the plane, operated by three experienced pilots, to crash without sending a mayday call.

Meanwhile, French officials said they may never discover why the aircraft crashed into the Atlantic and cautioned they might not even find the plane’s black boxes on the ocean floor.

Officials in Brazil said search teams had spotted four more clusters of debris about 90km south of the first wreckage discovered on Tuesday in the middle of the Atlantic.

Paul Louis Arslanian, the head of France’s air accident investigation agency, said he was not sure that the black boxes would be recovered and said the probe might prove frustrating.

Not optimistic

"I am not totally optimistic. We cannot rule out that we will not find the flight recorders," Arslanian told reporters, warning the inquiry could take a long time to wrap up. "We might end up with a finding that is relatively unsatisfactory in terms of certainty," he added.

—Reuters