Teams search for missing passengers
Search teams are concentrating their efforts in a part of the Atlantic where two bodies believed to be from the missing Air France flight were found.
Five Britons were among 228 people - including 12 crew, a baby and seven children - thought to have perished in the world's worst aviation disaster since 2001.
Saturday's discovery came on the day French investigators said the communications system on flight AF 447, which was en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris last Sunday, transmitted 24 error messages ahead of the flight's disappearance and its autopilot was not working.
Colonel Jorge Amaral, a spokesman for the Brazilian air force, said two male bodies were recovered from an area where the jet is believed to have crashed. They were picked up roughly 400 miles northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast, he added.
A leather suitcase containing a plane ticket for the flight and a backpack with a laptop and a vaccination card were also found.
The bodies were being transported to the islands for identification as investigators continued to search an area of the ocean stretching several hundred square miles.
Structural engineer Arthur Coakley, 61, from near Whitby, North Yorkshire, and oil worker Graham Gardner, 52, from Gourock, Renfrewshire, were among the five Britons on flight AF447. Orthodontist Dr Jose Souza, Alexander Bjoroy, an 11-year-old boy who held a British passport, were also on board. And Londoner Neil Warrior - a PR director for Mazda Europe, aged in his 40s - was also on the plane, colleagues said.
Three Irish women - all doctors who had graduated from Trinity College Dublin - were also on the plane with a Welsh female friend. Former Riverdance performer Eithne Walls, 28, from Ballygowan, Co Down, was travelling with her friends Aisling Butler, 26, of Roscrea, Co Tipperary, and Jane Deasy of Dublin, who was also in her 20s.
At a briefing in Paris, the investigators said the Airbus A330's communication system transmitted 24 error messages ahead of the flight's disappearance. Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the French agency leading the crash investigation, said it was not clear if the autopilot had been switched off by the pilots or had stopped working because it received conflicting airspeed readings.
More than half of the 24 error messages - 14 - were sent within the space of one minute, from 3.10am BST to 3.11am BST. The messages showed "inconsistencies" between measured velocities and indications of systems failures including the autothrust and autopilot, the investigators said.
