THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT and Air France are to resume the search for a Airbus A300 jet that disappeared en route from Rio de Janiero to Paris, with the loss of all 228 on board, last year.

Air France flight 447 went off radar on June 1, 2009, with the cause of its disappearance never fully discovered. The bodies of just 51 victims were recovered, along with shards of the plane’s debris, with the rest presumed lost on the ocean floor, hundreds of miles northeast of Brazil.

The ‘black box’ flight recording devices were also never found, severely hampering any investigations into the accident. The search for the bodies and for the debris of the plane continued sporadically until May of this year, but without any success in locating the flight recorders.

That was despite the deployment of French nuclear submarines and US Navy vessels which scanned an area spanning over 6,700 square miles around the spot where the plane was thought to have crashed, scanning the ocean floor for signs of the box’s electronic pulse for as long as its battery was expected to last for.

The location of the recorders is considered paramount in efforts to identify the cause of the accident, with the last contact received at air traffic control stations catching automated broadcasts from the aircraft, presumably sent after it could be saved.

The resumption of the search comes after the families of those still missing demanded answers for how the plane disappeared,  and the search will begin for a fourth time in February of next year.

The renewed recovery efforts will be overseen by France’s newly-appointed Transport Minister Thierri Mariani, who is to compile a final report on the Flight 447 tragedy thereafter.