New Atlantic hunt ordered for Air France plane wreckage

France will conduct another search for wreckage of an Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic last year with 228 people on board en route from Rio to Paris, officials said yesterday.

“The fourth sea search phase should begin in February 2011,” junior transport minister Thierry Mariani said in a statement.

Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down roughly midway between Brazil and Senegal on June 1, 2009, the deadliest crash in Air France’s history.

A third search of the ocean floor to try to locate the black box flight recorders ended in failure in May.

Crash investigators have acknowledged in previous reports that Airbus 330-200’s airspeed monitors were faulty, but ­maintain this could not have been the sole cause of the disaster.

A series of automatic error messages were emitted by the onboard flight computer shortly before the plane disappeared from radar.