Air France to compensate crash victims' families

"For now we are going to concentrate on the first advance that will be paid for each victim, approximately 17,500 euros ($24,420)," Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said on RTL radio.

"The lawyers of our insurers in every country are talking to the victims' families to try and organize this advance payment," he said.

Gourgeon presented the payments as a compassionate gesture from the airline, not an admission of liability. He also said said that Air France is looking into holding a memorial for all of the victims.

As they work to unravel the mystery of Air France Flight 447, aviation analysts and pilots are now urging investigators to focus attention on the plane's tail fin, known as the vertical stabilizer, in addition to the design of the Airbus's computerized flight controls.

The vertical stabilizer is one of the largest intact pieces of the plane recovered so far, and one of the 24 automatic messages sent from the plane minutes before it disappeared pointed to a problem in the 'rudder limiter,' a mechanism that limits how far the plane's rudder can move. The rudder is the flight control on the vertical stabilizer, or tail fin. Aviation analysts note that several Airbus 300 series jets have had tail fin and rudder problems in the past. 

Paolo Carmassi, a top executive for Honeywell Aerospace, which built the flight data recorder aboard Air France Flight 447, said that retrieving the flight data could help solve the mystery of the plane's fate and said his company had never lost a black box involved in an accident.

"We believe that our technology is well-positioned to, in this case, contribute to solve the big question around this particular accident," Carmassi said.

"We have a 100 percent recovery rate of all the black boxes that we have installed that unfortunately may have been involved in accidents so we hope that we will be able to maintain our record and be able to shed some light on what happened."

According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, a system to provide more detailed weather information that may have helped both Jenkins and Dubois has been under development for at least four years by the agency and counterparts around the globe. The satellite-based upgrade of air-traffic management, primarily aimed at ascertaining aircraft positions more accurately, will have the ability to send real-time climate images and data to cockpits.

Seeing the severity of the storm an hour before reaching it “would have been useful” in the case of Flight 447, giving the pilot more time to find holes to fly through, said John Hansman, director of the International Center for Air Transportation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

In the U.S., the proposed technology is called NextGen, for Next Generation Air Transportation System, and is estimated to cost the government as much as $22 billion to develop, according to the FAA. The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast link, being built by a team led by ITT Corp., is slated to be operational by 2013, according to the FAA Web site. ITT, based in White Plains, New York, is a manufacturer of engineering products and communications systems.