Paris, July 2 (Reuters): The Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic last month with 228 people on board was not destroyed in mid-air but hit the water intact and at high speed, French investigators said today.

Flight AF-447 went missing during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1. The exact cause of the disaster is not yet known.

“The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight. It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration,” said Alain Bouillard, who is leading the investigation on behalf of France’s BEA air accident board.

Bouillard said control of the flight was supposed to have passed from air traffic controllers in Brazil to their counterparts in Senegal, but that never happened. He said the pilots of flight AF-447 had tried three times to connect to a data system in the Senegalese capital Dakar, but had failed, apparently because Dakar had never received the flight plan.