BODIES FOUND FROM AIR FRANCE CRASH IN ATLANTIC.

Brazilian search crews on Saturday retrieved the first bodies from a crashed Air France flight in the Atlantic, and the plane's maker said it had detected faulty speed readings on the same type of jets. Navy ships found the bodies of two men and debris including a blue seat with a serial number matching Air France flight 447, a rucksack containing a vaccination card, and a briefcase with an Air France ticket inside, rescue officials said. "This morning at 8:14 a.m., we confirmed the rescue from the water of pieces and bodies that belonged to the Air France flight," air force spokesman Jorge Amaral told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife. Brazilian air force planes and navy ships have been scouring a swathe of the Atlantic about 1,100 km (683 miles) northeast of Brazil's coast since the Airbus A330-200 plane disappeared on Monday, killing all 228 people on board. The crash of the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris was the world's deadliest air disaster since 2001 and the worst in Air France's 75-year history. Fears have grown that many bodies sank or were devoured by sharks. Theories about the crash have focused on the possibility that airspeed sensors malfunctioned, leading the pilots to set the wrong speed as the plane passed through storms. French air investigators said on Saturday that Airbus had detected faulty speed readings on its A330 jets ahead of last week's crash and had recommended clients replace a sensor. The head of France's air accident agency (BEA) said in a news conference that it was too soon to say if problems with the pressure-based speed sensors were in any way responsible for the disaster. "Some of the sensors (on the A330) were earmarked to be changed ... but that does not mean that without these replacement parts, the (Air France) plane would have been defective," BEA chief Paul-Louis Arslanian said. Airbus confirmed it issued a bulletin asking the plane's 50 or so airline operators to consider changing the speed sensors, known as Pitot tubes, but it said it was an optional measure to improve performance and not related to safety. The date of the bulletin was not immediately clear, and an Air France spokesman said he did not yet know whether the sensors had been changed on the stricken jet.