PARIS, France (CNN) -- Air France will pay families about €17,500 ($24,500) in initial compensation for each victim of the crash of Flight 447 this month, the company's chief executive says.
French Senator Gerard Larcher throws a tribute wreath into waters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Thursday.
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 Friday.
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."
The aircraft has not been found, though search teams have found dozens of pieces of debris in the water and think they know the general location of the wreck. The head of the French accident investigation board, Paul-Louis Arslanian, said this week that there is a chance the entire aircraft may never be found.
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