Black box data from crashed Air France jet intact

INVESTIGATORS have pulled data from the black boxes of an Air France jet which crashed in the Atlantic in 2009, boosting efforts to explain what caused the disaster and killed all 228 people on board, including three Irish women.

France’s BEA air crash investigation agency said it had managed to transfer all the information stored in devices hauled from the seabed two weeks ago, almost two years after the Airbus A330 vanished in an equatorial storm.

The transfer — carried out at the weekend and filmed in front of investigators from four countries and French judicial officials — is the most important breakthrough yet in efforts to find out what caused the mysterious crash.