Crash jet black box alert was false alarm

Signals detected by search teams looking for wreckage from the Air France Flight 447 disaster in the Atlantic are not from its black box flight recorders, officials said today.

An aide to France's top transport official Jean-Louis Borloo said the black boxes have not been detected.

She said that French military ships searching in the area where the plane crashed have "heard sounds" but that those were not signals from the flight's voice or data recorders.

Earlier French newspaper Le Monde reported that French ships had detected a "very weak signal" from the black boxes.

The boxes are key to determining what happened to the plane that plunged into the ocean on May 31, killing all 228 on board.