The French navy has closed in on the black boxes of the Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic nearly a year ago.
French officials cautioned that this did not mean that the black box flight recorders will be successfully retrieved from the ocean floor.
The flight recorders have been localised within three nautical miles in an area 200 nautical miles northwest of the Brazilian archipelago of Sao Pedro and Sao Paulo.
Flight 447 was en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it went down on 1 June in stormy weather, killing all 228 people on board.
A navy spokesman said: 'It's like trying to find a shoe box in an area the size of Paris, at a depth of 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) and in a terrain as rugged as the Alps.'
The black boxes may indicate what caused the disaster, which remains largely unexplained.
The breakthrough in pinpointing the zone came after new computer software was used to decode data collected by deep-sea submarines during their search in June and July last year.
Three Irish doctors and two Eastern European Aer Lingus workers were on the flight.
