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French investigators reported on Monday that the doomed Air France Flight 447 from Rio to Paris may have performed a U-turn for some unknown reason before plunging into the Atlantic almost one year ago.

This possible deviation from the plane’s flight path was based on the site where investigators located the black box flight recorders in the Atlantic.

“If we find the wreckage in that zone, that means that the plane must have at some point made a U-turn, but why? No one knows. It is premature to speculate on possible scenarios”, remarked BEA Director Jean-Paul Troadec.

Considered the worst aviation accident in the 75-year history of Air France, Air France Flight 447 crashed in turbulent weather on 1 June, 2009, taking the lives of all 228 on board.

Last week, the French navy reported that it has pinned down the location of the flight recorders after a new examination of submarine sonar data gathered in June and July of the previous year. The black boxes had then still been giving off a signal.

A research craft was sent to the site to perform new searches, according to investigators. The black boxes are vital to determining the cause of the disaster, which is still mostly a mystery.

Several of the victims’ relatives and pilots’ unions have accused plane manufacturer Airbus and Air France of dismissing longstanding malfunctions in air speed monitors on its planes before the disaster.

In an initial report on the disaster, the BEA said that the false readings produced by the plane’s speed probes were ‘one of the factors’ in the crash, but ‘not the sole cause’.

An extended deep-sea search operation to locate the remains of an Air France plane that plunged into the Atlantic in 2009, leaving no survivors, has been employed to include a wider stretch of ocean, announced investigators on Tuesday.

On 1 June 2009, Air France flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into a far-off portion of the Atlantic in the middle of a storm, leaving 228 dead.

While some fragments were recovered from the surface of the water, the black box flight recorders have so far remained missing, and investigators claim these instruments are necessary for them to determine the cause of the crash.

Two high-tech vessels, equipped with miniature submarines, have been trawling a 3,000 square-kilometre (1,860 square-mile) area of the Atlantic in an attempt to recover the Airbus A330 plane’s flight recorders. However, recent attempts have failed.

The mission was scheduled to close next weekend, but France’s air accident investigation authority, the BEA, announced on Tuesday that the search has been extended through 25 May.

“The BEA believes that it is in fact still possible to localise the airplane wreckage in or near the zone that has just been explored”, the agency claimed in a statement.

The BEA added that Airbus and Air France have agreed to donate € 1.5 million in support of the extension.

Speculation regarding the reason for the crash has centred on the possibility of ice on the plane’s speed sensors, after appearing to display inconsistent readings moments before the aircraft disappeared. However, investigators will have to obtain the flight recorders to either disprove or verify this theory.

The crash of an Air France aircraft off the shore of Brazil in 2009, which resulted to the death of 228 individuals, may have been due to air speed probes’ poor maintenance, a report said.

An initial report into the flight AF 447’s loss in June 2009 said that experts took away nine ‘pilot tubes’ out of the 84 total tubes seized from Air France and discovered that some were either highly or slightly degraded.

The recent finding could suggest that the speed probes were not cleaned regularly, according to the Liberation newspaper, which has been able to see a copy of the report.

French air accident investigation agency BEA said in December that the aircraft’s speed probes, created by the French company Thales, gave flawed readings and they were among the factors in the accident but not the only cause.

Airbus and air authorities from Europe and the US instructed airlines to replace the tubes on A340 and A330 aircraft produced by Thales with a model manufactured by US company Goodrich.

The French flag carrier stated that BEA’s investigation “showed that Air France scrupulously respected all the procedures set out by the manufacturers and the authorities”.

Air France also said that it did not see the report mentioned by the Liberation newspaper.

A lawyer who represents the victims’ families said the new report does not present a great deal of new information and that they would only trust the investigating judges.

UFPL-CFTC pilot’s union chief Gérard Arnoux, however, questioned BEA’s impartiality. “They are stuck in the same obsessive refusal to acknowledge that the probes are the prime cause of the accident”, said Arnoux.

The AF 447, an Airbus A330, crashed on 1 June as the jet was travelling from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France.

French authorities have resumed the search for the black box recording devices of an Air France airplane that crashed off the Brazilian coast last June and killed all 228 passengers and crews on board.

In a news conference, Bureau of Investigations and Analyses Director Jean-Paul Traodec said that they are launching a new phase of the search in an attempt to determine the cause of the incident.

“I conveyed to Brazilian families in December our intention to resume the search. I have returned to Brazil to announce that it has been launched”, said Traodec.

“Without the discovery of the wreckage and the flight recorders the causes of the accident cannot be known”, he added.

The latest search follows two intensive yet unproductive sweeps on the Atlantic Ocean months after the disaster that turned up remains, but not the cockpit recorders and flight data.

Authorities claimed the devices are critical to understanding what triggered the accident, which remains mostly unexplained.

Relatives of the victims mainly blamed the accident on the Airbus A330’s defective airspeed sensors, based on a string of automatic alerts from the doomed jetliner.

The new operation involves a pair of ships, one Norwegian and one American, packed with advanced equipment such as underwater robots and sonars intended to scour the ocean depths for at least four weeks, in a 770 square-mile (2,000-square-kilometer) zone.

Air France flight AF447 crashed on 1 June, as it was flying en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro with the crew and passengers of 32 nationalities on board, including 26 Germans, 58 Brazilians and 72 French citizens.

French officials have confirmed that the search for the missing Air France plane that was lost off the cost of Brazil in June last year is to resume.

The search of Atlantic waters is planned in the hopes of discovering the jet’s missing flight recorders, which may be able to shed some light on the causes of the crash that killed 228 people.

Initial searches last summer recovered parts of the wreckage, as well as the bodies of 21 victims of the crash.

And now officials have confirmed that ships from Norway and America will use sonar technology and  remote operated search devices to try and find the all important black boxes which will hopefully contain stored data from flight AF447 – which left Rio de Janeiro bound for Paris on June 1.

However French air accident investigation agency head Jean Paul Troadec warned that the task was not an easy one and that attempting to recover the lost flight recorders represented “one of the most complex undersea operations ever.”

However BEA boss Troadec added that the effort offered the best possible chance of finding the vital clues in the ongoing investigation.

The operation will involve the scanning of 770 square miles of ocean for signs of the wreckage of the airliner.

Mr Troadec told reporters: “First we have to find the haystack, then we look for the needle.”

Initial investigations revealed a malfunction of the planes airspeed probes, but this is not thought to be the only contributing factor to the fatal crash.

French airline, Air France is urging overweight passengers to purchase a second seat in order to ensure they will be able to fly, it was reported yesterday.

The company has asked obese passengers to consider paying for a second seat at a 25% discount or risk being prevented from flying.

The company, which was successfully sued by a 353 pound passenger in 2007 after ordering them to pay for a second seat of a full flight between New Dehli and Paris, has said that heavy passengers will need to pay to reserve a second seat if they wish to be sure of flying.

Under new rules, overweight passengers who have not reserved two seats on a fully booked flight could be prevented from boarding their flight.

The ultimate decision in each case will be left up to the captain, but a Air France spokesman Nicolas Pettau said that the measure was being introduced for security reasons.

He told reporters yesterday: “It is an issue that the company faces -  it is a question of security.”

Fat passengers have been told that the cost of their second seat will be fully reimbursed in the event of their flight not being full, but that a double booking is the only way to ensure their passage in peak times.

Industry commentators have speculated that allowing an overweight passengers to board an already full flight would have comfort implications for the travellers placed next to them as well as posing a possible risk in the event of the flight needing to be evacuated.