French Transport Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told local media on Monday that "an important part" of the crashed Air France flight 447 was located, which posed the hope to find recording boxes of the doomed plane killing all 228 lives on board in 2009.


HTML clipboard Debris of the missing Air France flight 447, recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, arrives at Recife's port in this June 14, 2009 file photo. France has discovered what appears to be part of an Air France passenger aircraft that crashed in the Atlantic almost two years ago, accident investigators said on April 3, 2011. A deep-sea salvage vessel located pieces of a plane in the past 24 hours and French experts believe they come from the missing A330-200 passenger plane, the BEA accident investigation authority said. Air France-KLM was placed under investigation on April 1, 2011 by a French court for involuntary manslaughter over the 2009 crash between Rio and Paris which killed 228 people, the airline's lawyer Fernand Garnault said. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
It was a "large part" and "important part" of the Airbus A330, "in one piece," the minister said on local radio France Inter. He added this discovery provided hopes to locate the "black boxes" soon but didn't elaborate which part of the debris is.


On Sunday night, the French air accident investigation agency BEA said in a statement that new pieces believed to come from the Air France flight plane that crashed in the Atlantic in June 2009 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were located.


The "wreckage containing bodies," according to France 24, is a surprising outcome after three phases of expensive searching attempts for recorders were proved in vain. Still, the BEA didn't identify what part of the plane was found, saying further details will come later.


VietNamNet/Xinhuanet