MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Hunt for Air France jet intensifies
Rescuers are searching waters deep in the Atlantic for a French airliner which disappeared in a storm early on Monday. The search, involving ships and planes from many nations, was part-suspended overnight, but aircraft with monitoring equipment continued to scour the sea.
The Air France Airbus was heading from Brazil to Paris when it disappeared.
France believes there is little hope of finding survivors from among the 228 passengers and crew aboard the flight.
Vessels from France, Spain, Senegal and Brazil are involved in the search, while the United States is said to be offering help with satellite reconnaissance.
Plane crews have narrowed their search to a zone of a few dozen nautical miles half-way between Brazil and west Africa, said Pierre-Henry Gourgeon, chief executive of Air France, late on Monday.
Their work may be aided by the Airbus's Argos beacons, which will emit signals for several days, he added.
An automatic report of a short circuit was the last communication received from the plane before it vanished over the ocean.
French officials believe it may have been disabled by a storm. French and US sources have ruled out terrorism as the cause of the plane's loss.
Most of the missing people are Brazilian or French but they include a total of 32 nationalities. Five Britons and three Irish citizens are among them.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy said he had told friends and relatives waiting at the Charles de Gaulle “the truth” - that the chances of finding anyone alive were “very small”.
If no survivors are found, it will be the worst loss of life involving an Air France plane in the firm's 75-year history.
US spy technology
A French reconnaissance plane based in Dakar, Senegal, was due to reach the suspected crash area on Monday evening.
It was to be followed by two other French planes based in Dakar, and a naval vessel currently cruising in the Gulf of Guinea, several days' sailing away.
Spain and Senegal have also sent planes to help in the search.
Mr Sarkozy confirmed that his government was approaching Washington for help, following reports that France had asked the US for access to satellites and listening stations.
Brazil has sent out seven air force planes and three naval ships to help in the search, far off the north-eastern Brazilian coast.
Air force spokesman Col Jorge Amaral said earlier they were trying to reach the point from where the aircraft had last made contact, about 1,200km (745 miles) north-east of Natal.
But Maria Celina Rodrigues, the Brazilian consul in Paris, said the depth of the ocean would make it difficult for searchers.
“They are hoping they can find debris, pieces, lifejackets that eventually float, but that takes some time,” she told the Associated Press.
The Brazilian authorities have also said they are investigating a possible sighting of wreckage in the area, reported Reuters news agency.
The crew of a TAM Linhas Aereas flight travelling over the area had reported seeing “bright spots” in the ocean about 1,300 km (800 miles) from the Fernando de Noronha archipelago off Brazil's north-eastern coast.
'Experienced' pilot
The plane's automatic report was generated at 0214 GMT on Monday, about four hours after Flight AF 447 left Rio de Janeiro, and as it was heading through turbulence towards the west African coast.
“A succession of a dozen technical messages” showed that “several electrical systems had broken down” which caused a “totally unprecedented situation in the plane”, said Mr Gourgeon.
“It is probable that it was shortly after these messages that the impact in the Atlantic came,” he told reporters at Charles de Gaulle airport, where the airliner had been due to land.
Flight AF 447 was flying at an altitude of 10,670m (35,000ft) shortly before it went missing.
A meteorologist who spoke to the Associated Press said tropical thunderstorms in the Atlantic could tower up to 15,240m (50,000ft).
“At the altitude it was flying, it's possible that the Air France plane flew directly into the most charged part of the storm - the top,” said Henry Margusity, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com.
French officials have stressed that the plane's captain was very experienced, clocking up more than 11,000 hours of flight.
Crisis centres have been set up at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and Rio's Tom Jobim international airport. (BBC)
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Jun 03rd, 2009 - 11:24 am 0MYSPACE.COM/KAYOMARBILUS
Hunt on for answers in Air France crash
Navy ships are due to arrive at a zone in the Atlantic off Brazil's coast where an Air France plane carrying 228 people crashed this week, as investigators focused on finding answers to the tragedy.
The first of the Brazilian navy vessels was to arrive today, joining three cargo ships from France and the Netherlands that were rerouted to the area on Monday after debris from Air France flight AF 447 was spotted.
PHOTOS: Airport grief
A Brazilian air force plane fitted with night-vision sensors conducted overnight sweeps of the zone, located around 500km northeast of Brazil's Fernando do Noronha archipelago, itself 400km from the mainland, officials said.
Another three air force aircraft were to be deployed after dawn, when visual sweeps would also be made for any sign of bodies.
Defence Minister Nelson Jobim on Tuesday confirmed that the spot in Brazilian waters was the crash site of the Air France Airbus A330.
“There are no doubts” a five-kilometre strip of floating debris — including cables, plane components and fuel slicks — marked the spot where the full flight went down, he told reporters.
The evidence extinguished any lingering hopes of finding survivors and confirmed the worst civil aviation accident since 2001, when an American Airlines jet crashed in New York killing all 260 people on board.
Brazil on Tuesday announced three days of national mourning for those who perished on the Air France plane. Catholic and Muslim services were to be held in Paris on Wednesday, including one in Notre-Dame cathedral to be attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Flight AF 447 was four hours into its 11-hour voyage from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it suddenly issued a series of automated data alerts indicating multiple electrical and pressurization failures and ceased contact with controllers.
The pilots did not issue any mayday distress call, leaving the accident a mystery — one that only the plane's black boxes can elucidate, if they can be found in Atlantic waters as deep as 6,000m.
Brazil's air force said France's Bureau of Investigations and Analyses (BEA) was responsible for the investigation into what was Air France's worst accident in its 70-year history.
A team of BEA officials were already at work in Brazil, it said.
Two operations would be conducted in parallel, Jobim said: the recovery of the debris, and the search for bodies.
Any human remains would be taken by ship to Fernando de Noronha, where they would be flown out on air force aircraft.
More than half of those travelling on the Air France jet were either French or Brazilian. The others came from 30 countries, mostly in Europe.
The 216 passengers included 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby. The crew comprised 11 French nationals and one Brazilian.
The 58-year-old French captain had been flying for Air France since 1988 and had a great deal of experience, the airline said.
Air France has suggested the four-year-old plane could have been struck by lightning — a fairly common hazard that by itself should not knock out a modern airliner, but coupled with other problems such as violent turbulence it could be dangerous.
Other theories advanced by experts include pilot error, mechanical defects or even the remote possibility of terrorism.
“No hypothesis is being favoured at the moment,” French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Tuesday.
“Our only certainty is that there was no distress call sent by the plane, but regular automatic alerts sent over three minutes indicated the failure of all systems,” he said.
A French ship was on its way to the zone, carrying two mini-submarines capable of operating at depths of 6,000m, which is also the limit aircraft black boxes can survive for up to 30 days.
But any recovery would be extremely tricky, not only because of the depth, but also because of powerful currents and storms in the zone.
“To find the plane, you'll need ships equipped with a special sonar, and possibly also rescue submarines — it's an enormous undertaking,” Commander Ronaldo Jenkins, safety coordinator for Brazil's airline association, told AFP.
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