Brazilian Navy races to crash site to begin retrieval operations.

The grim task of recuperating the bodies and piecing together what happened to AF 447 begins today.

By Alonso Soto – 2 hrs 53 mins ago
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Brazilian navy divers rushed on Wednesday to reach the wreckage of an Air France jet and start pulling debris from the Atlantic Ocean, where the plane with 228 people went down in the airline's worst disaster in its 75-year history.
Four navy ships with recovery equipment and a tanker were headed to a 3-mile strip of water strewn with plane seats, an orange buoy, wiring, hunks of metal and jet fuel stains about 745 miles northeast of the coastal city of Recife.
Rear Admiral Domingos Nogueira said the navy was battling tough weather as officials predicted the hardest task would be finding the flight data and voice recorders that hold clues to why the plane fell out of the sky during a severe storm in the middle of the night.
Distraught relatives who had prayed for a miracle gave up hope as experts were certain that all aboard died on the flight, which left Rio de Janeiro on Sunday night bound for Paris.
"I just want to find my son's body so that he can have a dignified burial," said Aldair Gomes, the father of Marcelo Parente, who was the head of the Rio mayor's cabinet.
So far no bodies have been sighted on flyovers by the air force, which spotted evidence of the catastrophe on Tuesday, allowing the navy to mount a retrieval operation.
"The ships are equipped to arrive and pick up pieces of the Airbus," Nogueira said. "Each ship has two divers on board and smaller ships to throw into the ocean to try and get pieces."
Helicopters would then be used to take wreckage of the Airbus A330 from the ships to a base on the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 430 miles from the crash site.
On Wednesday, armed forces spokesman Christophe Prazuck told Reuters that the French army had no doubt that the debris belonged to the stricken plane.