WORLD BRIEFING / FRANCE

Air France has finished replacing airspeed monitors on all its long-haul Airbus aircraft, a pilots union official said.

Air France Flight 447, which crashed May 31, killing 228, was an Airbus A330. The search for its black boxes was reinforced with a high-tech U.S. Navy device that began listening for pings in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

With the flight recorders still missing, the probe has focused on external speed monitors that may have iced over and given false readings to the plane’s computers.

Air France had begun replacing the sensors -- pitot tubes -- on its A330 and A340 jets before the accident, but had not yet changed them on the plane that crashed.