Wreckage from the 2009 Air France crash was located in the South Atlantic Ocean, stoking optimism that investigators may be able to determine the cause of the disaster that killed 228 people.

Debris of Flight 447 was located by the Alucia search vessel, France's air-crash investigation agency said in a statement. The discovery follows three previous attempts to locate the aircraft, which went down on June 1, 2009, during a trip to Paris Charles De Gaulle airport from Brazil.

The discovery "gives hope that information on the causes of the accident, so far unresolved, will be found," Air France-KLM Chief Executive Officer Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said in an April 3 statement.

Investigators may now be able to recover flight recorders, or black boxes, from the Airbus SAS A330 wide-body aircraft that store flight data and could help explain the crash. Air France and Airbus have both been charged with manslaughter over the crash, the worst accident in the Paris-based airline's history.

Neither the air-crash agency nor Air France disclosed the site of the discovery. BEA, as the French agency is known, said on March 27 that it was searching for the remains of the aircraft off the coast of Brazil. The BEA couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

Flight Recorders

The cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders store detailed records of the pilots' conversations as well as technical information, which can help determine the cause of a crash. The boxes, which sit in the rear part of the aircraft, are designed to withstand heavy impact and emit a signal for several weeks to help recovery. While previous search missions pulled some wreckage and victims from the sea, the recorders were not found.

Other black boxes found more than a year after an accident have yielded information. In the case of a South African Airways Boeing 747 that crashed in the Indian Ocean in 1987, a deep- water recovery team found the voice recorder in 16,000 feet of water more than a year later. Both Airbus and Air France have helped fund the cost of the search for the Air France jet.

The BEA has said there can be no certainty about the cause of the accident unless the black boxes are found.

Essential Data

"Airbus welcomes the news of the discovery of the AF447 wreckage," said Stefan Schaffrath, a spokesman for the Toulouse-based planemaker. "We do hope that this discovery will lead to the retrieval and the reading of the two recorders because these data are essential for the understanding of this accident."

Air France and Toulouse, France-based Airbus have both said they disagree with the preliminary manslaughter charges that were laid against them last month by a French investigating judge. France is one of the few countries in the world where fatal accidents automatically prompt criminal probes that run alongside investigations by aviation authorities.

The BEA has said a contributing factor to the crash may have been speed sensors, or Pitot tubes, icing up and causing unreliable readings. The agency made the suggestion after reviewing data transmitted in the last minutes before the crash.

Gourgeon said last month there's no evidence that the crash was caused by the Pitot tubes, which were made by Thales SA. Alain Bouillard, BEA chief investigator, also said last year that speed-sensor failure couldn't alone explain the crash, and that aviation records in Europe and the U.S. document dozens of incidents where the probes failed and pilots retained control.

Still, within three months of the accident, authorities in Europe and the U.S. ordered carriers to replace Thales Pitot tubes fitted on Airbus A330s with ones made by Goodrich Corp.