French investigators have found parts of an Air France plane that crashed over the Atlantic while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in June 2009, and hoped to locate the black boxes.
The plane went down roughly midway between Brazil and Senegal on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board, in the deadliest crash in Air France's history.
"During search operations in the sea carried out in the last 24 hours... the team on board the Alucia located parts of a plane," France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) said in a statement.
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"These elements were identified by BEA investigators as belonging to the wreckage of the A330-203 plane, flight AF 447" that crashed, the statement said.
BEA Director Jean-Paul Troadec also told AFP that investigators have hope of finding the plane's black boxes because the debris area was relatively concentrated.
"The favourable news is that the debris area is relatively concentrated. And this gives us hope of finding the black boxes," he said.
Troadec said the parts of the wreckage that had been found consisted of "engines and certain elements of the wing."
A new search for the wreckage had been launched on March 25 with the help of the Alucia, an American exploration vessel -- the fourth attempt to find the debris in hopes of discovering what caused the crash.
The official cause remains undetermined, but it has been partly blamed on malfunctioning speed sensors used by Airbus, with Air France accused of not responding quickly enough to reports that they might be faulty.
The Alucia came from Seattle in the northwest coast of the United States carrying three Remus submarines that were to search the ocean floor.
Air France and Airbus -- who are being probed for alleged manslaughter in connection with the crash -- are paying the estimated $12.7 million cost of the search.
Troadec had earlier told AFP that the latest search would take a different approach, with investigators trying to simply find the wreckage rather than searching specifically for the flight recorders, or "black boxes."
The latest search also included a much larger area of a 46-mile (75-kilometre) radius around the last known position of Flight 447.
A third search of the ocean floor to try to locate the black boxes ended in failure last May.
