6:56am UK, Friday June 05, 2009
Salvage teams have yet to recover any wreckage from missing Air France Flight 447, despite earlier reports.

A Brazilian air force official said debris recovered from the crash site was not from the lost Airbus A330.

Brigadier Ramon Cardoso, director of Brazilian air traffic control, said: "Up to now, no material from the plane has been recovered.

Brazilian navy boat Grajau Class which is searching for debris from the Air France crash

Navy craft are searching for debris

"We confirm that the pallet found is not part of the debris of the plane. It's a pallet that was in the area, but considered more to be trash."

Items, including a cargo pallet and two buoys pulled from the sea on Thursday actually came from another source, he said, most probably a ship.

The pallet was made of wood and the Air France Airbus A330 did not have any wooden pallets on board.

He also said a big oil slick originally thought to come from the plane probably also came from a ship passing through the zone, 600 miles off Brazil's coat.

The fuel slick had originally been used as evidence to suggest the plane did not explode - now a theory under question.

A sudden event caused the autopilot to disengage. The 'cascade' is one system after another failing within seconds of each other. That included the cabin pressure. This suggests the pilots would have had little or no time to attempt to do anything.

A sudden event caused the autopilot to disengage. The 'cascade' is one system after another failing within seconds of each other. That included the cabin pressure. This suggests the pilots would have had little or no time to attempt to do anything.

Sky's foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall on the Air France flight's final four minutes

It is five days since the passenger plane went down off Brazil's northeastern coast, killing all 228 people aboard in the world's worst aviation disaster since 2001.

Investigators are still trying to work out why the plane ditched in a violent storm over the Atlantic.

Some think unusual weather may have caused instruments to fail, but they will have little to go on until they recover the plane's black box.

It is thought the box is now on the sea floor, miles beneath the surface, making it very difficult to retrieve.

Other potential causes - including terrorism - have yet to be ruled out.

France's accident investigation agency has established that a series of automatic messages gave conflicting signals about the plane's speed and the flight path went through dangerously stormy weather.

But the agency warned against any "hasty interpretation or speculation" after the French newspaper Le Monde reported, without naming sources, that the Air France plane was flying at the wrong speed.