The search by ships for wreckage from Air France flight AF 477, which came down early Monday as it was flying from Rio to Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board, continued in a zone where confirmed items from the plane had been spotted earlier in the week.

'Up to now, no material from the plane has been recovered,' Brigadier Ramon Cardoso, director of Brazilian air traffic control, told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife late on Thursday.

That contradicted a statement Cardoso made earlier Thursday when he said a palette and two buoys plucked from the Atlantic by navy crews were the first pieces of the Air France crash.

In fact, Cardoso admitted later, they were nothing more than sea 'trash,' probably from a ship, as was a big oil patch originally described as a fuel slick from the French jet.

Several Brazilian navy vessels are looking for debris from the plane, including a seat and a big chunk of what appeared to be fuselage, sighted by air force aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Defense Minister Nelson Jobim has said there was 'no doubt' that the debris spotted from the air came from flight AF 477, and that they marked the area close to where the plane hit the ocean.

The French government, which is in charge of the probe into the crash, has sent investigators to Brazil to inspect any debris that could be recovered from the zone, around 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) off-shore, and take them back to France.

Speculation over what caused the accident has ranged from a massive, lightning-packed storm in the area at the time, to turbulence, to pilot error or a combination of factors.

No mayday call was received from the plane, just a series of data transmissions signaling it had lost power and then had either broken up or gone into a fatal dive. -- AFP

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