Search teams say they have discovered part of a flight recorder from the Air France plane that crashed in 2009, off the coast of Brazil.

搜救人员称，他们已找到2009年在巴西沿岸海域坠落的法国航空客机上的一部分飞行记录器。

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Hundreds of images have been taken of the Air France wreckage
But they say they have yet to find the section containing crucial data which could reveal the cause of the crash.

The Air France Airbus plane went down in the Atlantic on 1 June 2009, killing² all 228 people on board.

The recorder section was recovered a day after a salvage³ ship（打捞船） began working to retrieve⁴（恢复，取回） bodies.

"During the first dive by the Remora 6000 which lasted more than 12 hours, the chassis⁵ of the flight data recorder was found, without the module⁶ protecting and containing the data," France's Bureau of Investigation⁷ and Analysis said in a statement.

They said a second dive was under way.

A spokeswoman for the bureau explained that though only the outer chassis of the flight recorder had been found, the flight data recorder itself, if recovered, could still be in a condition to be read.

"The memory module is like a sarcophagus（石棺，大理石） - the information is very well protected," she told Reuters.

Investigators⁸ and Airbus stress that without the "black box" flight recorder, the mystery of the plane's last moments may never be solved.

The wreckage of the flight was found on a fourth attempt, using robots capable of operating 4,000m (13,120ft) below the ocean's surface.

Those who died on the Paris-bound Air France jet, which came down hours after it took off from Rio de Janeiro came from more than 30 countries, though most were French, Brazilian or German.