Search: Air France crash report
French authorities are to publish the first official report into the Air France plane crash in the Atlantic which claimed 228 lives.
Five Britons and three Irish nationals were among those aboard the Airbus A330 aircraft which was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when all contact was lost in the early hours of June 1.
There has been speculation that the flight crew could have received faulty speed information as they flew into bad weather.
But with hope of finding the plane's "black box" flight recorders almost gone, UK aviation experts fear that the exact cause of the disaster may never be known.
The experts also reckon that Thursday's report - from France's air investigations and analysis office - may not be able to throw much more light on the cause of the crash than is already in the public domain.
What is known is that the flight crew reported they were going through an area of bad weather. After that there were a series of automatic electronic messages from the plane which were received by Air France and which indicated multiple problems with the aircraft.
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There has been speculation that the Pitot tubes which indicate just how fast the aircraft is going were faulty. A330 aircraft have suffered Pitot tube problems in the past and Air France has now replaced them on all its Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft.
A massive search operation was mounted after the plane went down and more than 50 bodies and hundreds of pieces of wreckage have been recovered.
It is possible that the report may be able to draw conclusions from the examination of the wreckage and the state of the bodies.
But it may never be known if the plane broke up in mid-air or crashed, intact, into the sea. Also, it seems strange that flight crew, by all accounts, carried on flying for so long into bad weather.
