Found, but no luck

The New York Times has an article by Christine Negroni about the Air France crash:

Wreckage spotted by Brazilian military planes in the Atlantic Ocean is that of missing Air France Flight 447, the Brazilian minister of defense said Tuesday afternoon at a news conference. The jet, bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 228 aboard, disappeared Sunday night without any distress call. Nelson Jobim, the defense minister, said that “without a doubt” the debris was from the Air France plane. Military planes located the wreckage in a three-mile strip in the ocean, as hope of finding survivors all but vanished. The debris included “an orange life vest, an aircraft seat, a drum, kerosene, and oil,” an earlier statement from the Brazilian military said.
Confirmation that the debris, floating 600 miles from the coast of Brazil, is from Flight 447 is sure to help investigators, who have few clues to go on. With no radar information from land and no distress call from the pilots, a series of data messages transmitted by satellite from the plane to Air France’s maintenance office was all the data they had.
Finding the tail of the plane is a high priority for investigators, because that is where the voice and data recorders are located.
The more critical recorder in this crash will be the cockpit voice recorder, said one investigator familiar with flight data devices. “The flight data shows how the aircraft is being operated, but the voice recorder tells you the pilots’ perceptions of what’s happening,” said the investigator. Evidence of a lightning strike— one theory of why the plane went down— would not be recorded on the flight data recorder, he said, but might very well be documented by the pilots’ observations in the cockpit.
The earliest indication of what may have happened on the airplane came 4 hours 11 minutes after the plane departed Rio, when a series of 10 reports transmitted from the Airbus 330 suggests that the flight encountered difficulties with stormy weather and electrical problems. Those issues could be interrelated; a loss of power could set off a catastrophic cascade of events.
The Airbus 330 is a fly-by-wire plane, in which flight controls are activated by electronics. “Very severe lightning may have caused some malfunction in the electronic control system,” said Tom Swift, a former chief scientist for fracture mechanics and metallurgy at the Federal Aviation Administration.
If lightning, turbulence, or some other problem caused a malfunction in the electronic control system, pilots might have difficulty flying or the airplane might begin maneuvers without being commanded to by pilots. Another avenue of interest to investigators may be a special emergency directive to operators of A330 and A340 models issued by European safety authorities this year. The directive followed several troublesome events in the models’ electronic flight system. More than a dozen people were seriously injured in October on a Qantas flight to Perth, Australia, from Singapore when the heavily loaded airplane, while cruising in level flight, abruptly pitched down. The authorities said the plane had provided random and erroneous information to the pilots, including a loss of altitude readings and warnings that the plane was about to stall. Whether Air France reported problems with any of its A330s was not clear.
Mr. Jobim said that finding wreckage of the plane would ultimately give hope to relatives of the crash victims that they would learn what had happened to their loved ones.
Charlstie Laytin, 31, of Island Park, New York, whose uncle and aunt, Michael and Anne Harris, were two Americans on the flight, agreed. “We certainly do hope to see the investigation continue until we know what happened,” she said. “It’s so hard to come to the point of closure when you don’t have your loved ones in front of you to grieve over.”
Air France did not release a passenger list on Tuesday but said that in addition to 2 Americans, it included, among others, 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians and 26 Germans.

Rico says that looks deep; they're gonna have to get some serious Navy subs to work this one...