Brazil Confirms Air France Jet Crash in Atlantic

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil (AP) ????????? Brazilian military planes found a 3-mile (5-kilometer) path of wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean, confirming that an Air France jet carrying 228 people crashed in the sea, Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said Tuesday. Jobim told reporters in Rio de Janeiro that the discovery "confirms that the plane went down in that area," hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.

"There isn't the slightest doubt that the debris is from the Air France plane," Jobim said.

He said the strip of wreckage included metallic and nonmetallic pieces, but did not describe them in detail. No bodies were spotted in the crash of the Airbus A330 in which all aboard are believed to have died.

The discovery came just hours after authorities announced they had found an airplane seat, an orange buoy and signs of fuel in a part of the Atlantic Ocean where ocean depths range from less than 1,610 meters (one mile) to more than 4,800 meters (three miles).

Jobim said recovery of the plane's cockpit voice and data recorders and other wreckage could be difficult because much of the wreckage sank.

"It's going to be very hard to search for it because it could be at a depth of 2,000 meters or 3,000 meters (1.2 miles to 1.8 miles) in that area of the ocean," Jobim said.

The initial discovery of wreckage announced before Jobim spoke came about 36 hours after the jet went missing as it flew from Rio de Janeiro toward Paris.

A Brazilian air force spokesman said the two spots where debris was located suggested the pilots may have tried to turn the plane around to return to Fernando de Noronha.

"The locations where the objects were found are toward the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," said the spokesman, Col. Jorge Amaral. "That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis."

Amaral said some of the debris was white and small, but did not describe it in more detail.


Jobim made the announcement after two commercial ships that joined the search late Tuesday morning reached sites where the debris was found, a Navy spokeswoman said.

"Once they come across the objects, they will be analyzed to determine if they are parts of the plane or just junk," she said.

A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane and 21 crew members arrived in Brazil on Tuesday morning from El Salvador and was to begin overflying the zone in the afternoon, U.S. officials said in a statement. The plane can fly low over the ocean for about 12 hours at a time and has radar and sonar designed to track submarines underwater.

The French dispatched a research ship equipped with unmanned submarines to the debris site. The subs can explore depths of up to 19,600 feet (6,000 meters). The U.S. was considering contributing unmanned underwater vehicles in the search as well, according to a defense source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

The 4-year-old plane was last heard from at 0214 GMT Monday (10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday) about four hours after it left Rio.

If no survivors are found, it would be the world's worst civil aviation disaster since the November 2001 crash of an American Airlines jetliner in the New York City borough of Queens that killed 265 people.

Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the plane down, with few clues to go on. Potential causes include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors.

The crew made no distress call before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost cabin pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of feet (meters) below the surface.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that if the debris is confirmed to be part of Flight 447, "This will allow us to better determine the search zone."
"We are in a race against the clock in extremely difficult weather conditions and in a zone where depths reach up to 7,000 meters (22,966 feet)," he told lawmakers in the lower house of French parliament Tuesday. Black box recorders can emit signals for up to 30 days.

The chance of finding survivors now "is very, very small, even nonexistent," said Jean-Louis Borloo, the French minister overseeing transportation.

The Airbus A330-200 was cruising normally at 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) and 522 mph (840 kph) just before it disappeared.

But just north of the equator, a line of towering thunderstorms loomed. Bands of extremely turbulent weather stretched across the Atlantic toward Africa.

Borloo called the A330 "one of the most reliable planes in the world" and said lightning alone, even from a fierce tropical storm, probably couldn't have brought down the plane.

"There really had to be a succession of extraordinary events to be able to explain this situation," Borloo said on RTL radio Tuesday.

France's junior minister for transport, Dominique Bussereau, said the plane sent "a kind of outburst" of automated messages just before it disappeared, "which means something serious happened, as eventually the circuits switched off."

French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said France has three military patrol aircraft flying over the central Atlantic, but could shift its search operations closer to the site of the Brazilian discovery. He said an AWACS radar plane also had been dispatched and should join the operation on Wednesday.

French police were studying passenger lists and maintenance records, and preparing to take DNA from passengers' relatives to help identify any bodies.

French Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" of terrorism, but all hypotheses must be studied.

Alain Bouillard, who led the probe into the crash of the Concorde in July 2000, was put in charge of France's accident investigation team.

President Barack Obama told French television stations the United States is ready to do everything necessary to find out what happened.

On board the flight were 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans, nine Chinese and nine Italians. A lesser number of citizens from 27 other countries also were on the passenger list.

Two Americans living in Rio de Janeiro were on board. Michael Harris, 60, a geologist, and his wife Anne, 54, were headed to Europe for work and vacation. They lived previously in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Among the passengers were three young Irish doctors, returning from a two-week vacation in Brazil. Aisling Butler's father John paid tribute to his 26-year-old daughter, from Roscrea, County Tipperary.

"She was a truly wonderful, exciting girl. She never flunked an exam in her life ????????? nailed every one of them ????????? and took it all in her stride," he said.

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Alan Clendenning reported from Sao Paulo. Associated Press writers Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo; Marco Sibaja in Brasilia; and Angela Charlton, Emma Vandore, Jean-Pierre Verges and Laurent Joan-Grange in Paris contributed to this report.

That's depressing. My thoughts go out to all those who lost family and friends in the crash. [:(]

Edit: wrong parenthesis...that's awkward.

Why are you posting a smiley face? This is tragic news to hear...

It's such a horrible thing when something like this happens. This is just another example of common sense that should become a part of a pilot's experience.

The pilot who landed in the Hudson River had gliding experience so he was able to safely land that plane, yet these two pilots thought it was a great idea to fly into a storm instead of simply go above and/or around it... Even though they say planes can handle lightning and turbulence, it's still a pretty dumb idea to just fly through it...

^Not really. It's not like there was one little thunderstorm and they decided to go through it, these clusters of storms are hundreds of miles wide. You can't really fly around them, and even if you don't go THROUGH an actual storm, there will still be very turbulent air.

See here.

That US NAVY P-3. That is my squadron. We sent 2 crews last night from here in EL Sal.

My thoughts also go to the families that lost there family members in this crash it is always said to have a plan crash anywhere in this world. I just wounder if this happens becuse lighting hit the plan or hail hit the plan or high winds made the plan crash over the ocean. I will be checking this site to see if there is any news about the plan crash. I hope that the members that live in the UK can tell me more about the plan crash sometime soon on this site in this topic. I hope that USA and the UK work togther to find out what happend to make this plan crash over the ocan I fell relly bad for all of the famlies that lost ther famly members in this plan crash over the ocan[:(]

Thanks Supercell... Since you have an affinity towards storms, I guess you have some more knowledge I lack...

Anyway, here comes hurricane season...oh boy

^^ Can we please get a spell check, or maybe learn to write?

Anything could of happened, in a storm like those and flying right through it, might of lost complete electrical control, and not have been able to see where they are, what their attitude, altitude, or speed was, so it could've overstressed, maybe the engines got taken out, and had no where else to go, and this pilot had no or not very much glider expirience, and the ocean did the rest. With no contact with the plane, we may never find out how it went down.

[:O] 228? wow................. I can't belive that many people gone. There hasn't been an airliner crash that bad since 9/11. this is like TWA 800 all over again[:(]

actually, like it says in the artical, it was the november after 9/11, in Queens.

They recently recovered two bodies and a briefcase from the flight.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/06/2009-06-06_bodies_of_victims_from_air_france_flight_447_recovered_after_mysterious_crash_ov.html

More than likely, that black box is some 20-something thousand feet under the surface, and they aren't going to get it, or they'll have a hard time finding it. This is a suprise, the a330's were really trusty, and this may have been some pilot error in this, I don't know how tall the storm was, but the a330's can fly up to 41,000 feet, I don't know if they could of flown over it.