FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil - Brazilian officials were preparing Monday to receive the first 16 bodies from an Air France jet that came down in the Atlantic Ocean a week ago with 228 people on board.

Military spokesman revised the number of bodies recovered by French and Brazilian ships over the weekend down from the 17 previously announced.

They said a French frigate handed over one less than expected, but did not explain the discrepancy.

Those remains, and dozens of structural components from the plane also plucked from the waves, were expected to arrive in the Brazilian archipelago Fernando de Noronha early on Tuesday.

From there the bodies would be flown to the mainland coastal city of Recife, a navy spokesman there, Captain Guicemar Tabosa told reporters.

Brazilian police forensic teams have been set up to identify the bodies using dental records and DNA from relatives.

Tabosa said navy crews had not yet confirmed information given by families on the doomed flight that it appeared two more bodies had been spotted on Monday.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in his weekly radio address on Monday that "everything was being done... so that we can find, if possible, all the bodies, because we know how much it means for a family to receive their lost loved one."

Brazilian and French teams continued to scour the crash zone 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) off Brazil's northeast coast for more bodies and pieces of wreckage.

Brazilian air force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Henry Munhoz said a stabilizer (one of the lateral mini-wings on the aircraft's tail) had been recovered. He showed a photo of the item -- the first important piece of debris to be collected.

A French military nuclear submarine was expected to arrive in the area on Wednesday to hunt for the elusive black boxes from Air France flight 447, which came down on June 1 with 228 people on board as it was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Homing beacons on the data devices, believed to lie on the sea floor at a depth of up to 6,000 meters (19,700 feet), will cease to operate in three weeks.

The US Navy said on Sunday it would send two towable pinger locators and a crew of around 20 to the scene later this week, in the hope of finding the data recorders.

"The first ship should head to the scene on (June) 10th," Pentagon spokesman and US navy commander Jeffrey Gordon told AFP. "They can be used for locating submarines or anything under the water that can emit a sound."

If the voice and data recorders are found, a French research sub -- the same one that has explored the wreck of the Titanic -- will be deployed to recover them. That small sub, the Nautile, is also expected to arrive within days.

Brazilian and French officials said there was no hope of finding survivors from the downed plane.

The disaster is the worst aviation accident since 2001, and unprecedented in Air France's 75-year history.

No distress call was received from the flight crew of the doomed plane.

Early suspicions are focusing on the Airbus A330's airspeed sensors, which appeared to have malfunctioned in the minutes before the catastrophe according to some of the 24 automatic data warnings sent by the plane.

Investigators are looking at whether the sensors, known as pilots, could have iced over, possibly leading the Air France pilots to fly into a storm in the zone that day without knowing their airspeed.

Such a scenario could have resulted in "two bad consequences for the survival of the plane," France's transport minister Dominique Bussereau told French radio on the weekend.

They were, he said: "Too low a speed, which can cause it to stall, or too high a speed, which can lead to the plane ripping up as it approached the speed of sound, as the outer skin is not designed to resist such speed."