AF crash families to get $24,500 as compensation

Air France will pay families about $24,500 in initial compensation for each victim of the crash of Flight 447 this month even as investigators are yet to solve the mystery of what brought the jet down.

So far, Air France has been in touch with about 1,800 relatives of the people who died when the Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, chief executive Paul-Henri Gourgeon told France's RTL radio.

The company is also providing families with counseling, he said.

"Of course, this is not always easy, (but) we make up for it," he said. "We have psychologists in each country, in each stop. You know that the passengers were of 32 different nationalities, so all that is of great complexity, but we have the ability to manage this complexity. It's just a question of means and no limits on the means that we put in place."

Gourgeon said it has been difficult tracing the relatives of all 228 victims.

"The modern world is different and we often have only a cell phone, and as you can imagine, this cell phone is unfortunately in the aircraft," he said. "So we probably put more hours to access all the relatives."

Some relatives of French victims have accused Air France of a lack of sympathy and of failing to keep them informed about the crash investigation.