Remembering the victims of Air France flight 447

A memorial service will be held in Paris on Tuesday for families of those who died in the Air France flight 447 crash last year.

It'll take place at the Parc Floral in the French capital and will be followed by the inauguration of a monument at the Père Lachaise cemetery

The commemorations will be private and reserved for the families of the 216 passengers and 12 crew members who died exactly a year ago when the Rio de Janeiro-Paris flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

But on the first anniversary of what was the worst accident in the airline's history, those whose loved ones perished are frustrated that so little progress has been made in determining the cause of the accident.

As the weekly news magazine Le Point says, the families looking for explanations are "caught in game of ping pong between different hypotheses; from Air France for example whose objective is to show that there was a fault in the design or construction of the aircraft (an Airbus A330-200 ) to Airbus which has suggested that the pilots were poorly trained or the 'plane poorly maintained."

"The assumptions," says Le Point "outnumber the certainties."

For Alain Jakubowicz, one of the lawyers representing the families, there has been a general unwillingness on the part of the investigating authorities to want to shed light on what really happened.

"In two of the reports released by the Bureau d'enquêtes et d'analyses (BEA, the French government agency responsible for investigating aviation accidents) there's no analysis of the autopsies carried out on the bodies that have been recovered," he's quoted as saying in another weekly news magazine L'Express.

"Investigators also downplay the role of the 'planes (speed) sensors," he added.

"Is there really any evidence that there's a desire by the investigators to provide information about the drama?"

It's that apparent lack of transparency which is most frustrating for many of the families according to Françoise Fouquet who lost her daughter and son-in-law in the accident.

"Everybody wants to know the truth and nobody can afford the luxury of not knowing," she told reporters on the eve of Tuesday's commemorations.

"The memory remains a nightmare and I have the impression that the suffering (of those who lost loved ones) has increased since the accident."