French accident investigators over the weekend extracted the data from the memory cards inside the flight recorders recovered from the ill-fated Air France Flight 447, increasing the likelihood that they’ll finally reach a conclusion about the cause of the June 1, 2009 crash into the South Atlantic that killed 228. BEA officials opened, extracted, cleaned and dried the memory cards from the flight recorders, and downloaded the information at the agency’s headquarters at LeBourget, outside Paris.

Film crews recorded the operations in their entirety in the presence of two German investigators from the BFU, a U.S. investigator from the NTSB, two British investigators from the AAIB and two Brazilian investigators from Cenipa, as well as an officer from the French judicial police and a court expert.

According to a BEA statement issued today, the downloads gathered all of the data from the flight data recorder (FDR), as well as the whole recording of the last two hours of the flight from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR).

An in-depth analysis of the data will take “several weeks,” said the BEA, after which it plans to write another interim report and publish it during the summer.