Relatives of some of the passengers on Air France Flight 447 are meeting Thursday with the French judge investigating the mysterious June crash into the mid-Atlantic that killed all 228 aboard.
The closed-door meeting is the first opportunity families of the crash victims have had since the accident over three months ago to hear directly from the magistrate, Sylvie Zimmermann, leading the judicial probe into the crash. A separate technical investigation by French air accident investigators into the crash is also underway.
"We'll be going of course to listen, we want to find out what resources are being used to do the investigation," said John Clemes, a member of an association of victims' families.
"We hope to find out what has been learned so far and to see what the next steps will be, and of course we'll have some questions as well for the judge," said Clemes, whose brother Brad was aboard Flight 447.
Clemes said the families are mainly interested in finding out what resources the judicial investigation is putting into the case.
"How do they count on moving ahead, what kind of experts are they using, what kind of data, information, scientists, ships, anything we can find out about the resources that are being allocated to the legal investigation," Clemes said.
The families are also still waiting for information from the autopsies of some of the 50 bodies that have been recovered from the crash site, Clemes said.
The plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro back to the French capital when it went down in a remote area of the Atlantic, 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) off Brazil's mainland and far from radar coverage. Automatic messages transmitted by the plane show its computer systems no longer knew its speed, and the automatic pilot and thrust functions were turned off.
