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Searchers for doomed Paris flight find debris
Source: Agencies |
June 3, 2009, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
BRAZILIAN military pilots spotted an airplane seat, a life jacket, metallic debris and signs of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean yesterday as they hunted for a missing Air France passenger jet that carried 228 people.
The pilots spotted two areas of floating debris - but no signs of life - about 60 kilometers apart, some 650 kilometers beyond the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, roughly along flight AF447's path from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, said Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral.
"The locations where the objects were found are toward the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," Amaral said. "That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis."
Ships zero in
Amaral said authorities would not be able to confirm that the debris is from the plane until they can retrieve some of it from the ocean for identification.
Brazilian military ships are not expected to arrive at the area until today. Brazil's Navy said in a statement yesterday that three commercial ships in the same vicinity as the debris were diverted from their normal routes to help with the search. The discovery came more than 24 hours after the jet went missing, with all feared dead.
Rescuers were still scanning a vast sweep of ocean extending from far off northeastern Brazil to waters off West Africa. The four-year-old plane was last heard from at 0214 GMT on Monday.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that if the debris is confirmed to be part of flight AF447, "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," he told lawmakers in the lower house of French parliament yesterday.
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 New York City that killed 265 people.
Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the Airbus A330 down, with few clues to go on so far. Potential causes could include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors.
The crew gave no verbal messages of distress before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of meters below the surface.
The chance of finding survivors now "is very very small, even nonexistent," said the French minister overseeing transportation, Jean-Louis Borloo. "The race against the clock has begun" to find the plane's two black boxes, which emit signals up to 30 days.
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.
French Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" of terrorism, but all hypotheses must be studied.
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, including two Americans.
The pilots spotted two areas of floating debris - but no signs of life - about 60 kilometers apart, some 650 kilometers beyond the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, roughly along flight AF447's path from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, said Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral.
"The locations where the objects were found are toward the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," Amaral said. "That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis."
Ships zero in
Amaral said authorities would not be able to confirm that the debris is from the plane until they can retrieve some of it from the ocean for identification.
Brazilian military ships are not expected to arrive at the area until today. Brazil's Navy said in a statement yesterday that three commercial ships in the same vicinity as the debris were diverted from their normal routes to help with the search. The discovery came more than 24 hours after the jet went missing, with all feared dead.
Rescuers were still scanning a vast sweep of ocean extending from far off northeastern Brazil to waters off West Africa. The four-year-old plane was last heard from at 0214 GMT on Monday.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that if the debris is confirmed to be part of flight AF447, "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," he told lawmakers in the lower house of French parliament yesterday.
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 New York City that killed 265 people.
Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the Airbus A330 down, with few clues to go on so far. Potential causes could include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors.
The crew gave no verbal messages of distress before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of meters below the surface.
The chance of finding survivors now "is very very small, even nonexistent," said the French minister overseeing transportation, Jean-Louis Borloo. "The race against the clock has begun" to find the plane's two black boxes, which emit signals up to 30 days.
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.
French Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" of terrorism, but all hypotheses must be studied.
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, including two Americans.
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