Searchers have found two bodies in the Atlantic Ocean near where an Air France jet is believed to have crashed, a Brazilian military official said Saturday.

Searchers also recovered a leather briefcase with a ticket for the flight inside it, air force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said.

"It was confirmed with Air France that the ticket number corresponds to a passenger on the flight," he said.

The male bodies were picked up Saturday morning roughly 650 kilometres northeast of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha islands, Amaral said. They were recovered about 70 kilometres south of where Air Flight 447 emitted its last signals.

The Airbus A-330 jet, carrying 228 people, disappeared last Sunday night en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris after flying into a band of thunderstorms. Those on board included a 49-year-old man originally from Guelph, Ont., who had been living in Brussels.

24 error messages

French investigators on Saturday said the plane generated 24 automated error messages in the final minutes of the flight, as one system after another shut down.

The French air accident investigation agency found that inconsistent airspeed readings by different instruments were issued as the crew struggled amid the storms.

One of the signals showed that the plane's autopilot was either not working or was turned off by the pilot.

Investigators have also said the plane lost cabin pressure and there was an electrical failure before the disaster. However, the pilots themselves sent no distress calls.

Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of the French investigation agency, said the messages likely meant Flight 447 was in trouble, perhaps flying too fast or too slowly through the stormy weather. He added it's impossible to tell from the plane's signals why the autopilot was not on.

Speed-measuring equipment

Airbus had recommended to all its airline customers that they replace speed-measuring instruments known as Pitot tubes on the A-330, Arslanian said.

"They hadn't yet been replaced" on the plane that crashed, said Alain Bouillard, the chief French investigator into the crash. Air France declined immediate comment.

Arslanian cautioned that it was too early to draw conclusions about the role of Pitot tubes in the crash, saying Airbus had made the recommendation for "a number of reasons."

Pitot tubes protrude from the wing or fuselage of a plane and help measure the speed and angle of flight, along with less vital information like outside air temperature. They feed airspeed sensors and are heated to prevent icing.

The investigation is increasingly focusing on whether external instruments might have iced over, confusing speed sensors and leading computers to set the plane's speed too fast or slow, a potentially deadly mistake in severe turbulence.

Investigators are relying on messages sent from onboard computers because chances are dwindling that the jetliner's voice and flight data recorders will ever be found.

French Defence Minister Hervé Morin announced Friday that his country has dispatched a nuclear-powered submarine to the search zone.

The vessel has advanced sonar equipment that may be able to locate the plane's black box and any sunken debris.

The black boxes on the Airbus A-330 are supposed to "ping" for 30 days before the batteries run out.

With files from The Associated Press