by CBS/AP
Published: Tue, June 02, 2009 - 7:48 am CST
Last Updated: Tue, June 02, 2009 - 7:51 am CST
(CBS/AP) Brazil's Air Force says it has found airplane seats and other debris floating in the Atlantic Ocean along the path that a missing Air France jet was flying.
Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral says the seats were spotted by search planes early Tuesday morning but that authorities cannot immediately confirm they were from the plane.
Also spotted were small white pieces of debris, material that may be metallic and signs of oil and kerosene, which is used as jet fuel.
The debris field was found about 390 miles northeast of the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.
Stormy seas and heavy clouds hampered the search Tuesday for wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people aboard. French investigators said a series of extraordinary events likely brought the airliner down.
Rescuers scanned deep waters in a vast zone extending from far off northeastern Brazil to waters off West Africa. The 4-year-old Airbus jet was last heard from at 10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
The search may be narrowed slightly on Tuesday after a possible sighting reported by pilots flying a commercial jet from Paris to Rio de Janeiro for Brazil's largest airline, TAM. They spotted what they thought was fire in the ocean along the Air France jet's route early Monday, the airline said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.
Investigators on both sides of the ocean worked through the night to determine what brought Air France 447 down - wind and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning, or a catastrophic combination of factors.
French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said bad weather made the search difficult Tuesday, with heavy clouds forcing search planes to fly very low over the water and limiting their line of sight.
"For the time being we can't find anything," he said. "There are a lot of squalls, a lot of storms."
Even once debris is found, the rescuers' work will be arduous.
"The research area overhangs an underwater mountain range as big as the Andes," Prazuck said. "The underwater landscape is very steep."
France's junior minister for transport, Dominique Bussereau, predicted a "very long investigation, it could be several days, several weeks, or several months."
President Barack Obama told French television stations the United States was ready to do everything necessary to find out what happened to the missing plane. France has sought U.S. satellite help to find the wreckage.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy told the families of those on board Monday that "prospects of finding survivors are very small."
France's Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" indicating terrorism was involved, but told French radio "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 the accident investigation team.
Air France said Tuesday that none of the plane's emergency locator beacons had been detected, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips, another indication the incident may have taken place extremely quickly.
Aviation Expert Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said on CBS' The Early Show that the automatic signals sent out from the plane indicating electrical problems and a loss of cabin pressure were "very ominous messages. These are automatic messages that are sent to the operations base of the air carrier, usually, for maintenance issues.
"I think what it indicated was that the plane was likely coming apart at that moment," he said.
Crash investigations are always expensive and always challenging, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes. But this one is practically unprecedented - searching hundreds of square miles for a needle in a haystack, and even if they do pinpoint the plane's location it may be under 10,000 feet of water.
Finding the jet may hinge on picking up a signal from the plane's transponders, which can ping for about 30 days once they hit water, adds Cordes.
If all 228 people on board the Airbus were killed, it would be the world's deadliest commercial airline disaster since 2001.
French police were studying passenger lists and maintenance records, and preparing to take DNA from passengers' relatives to help identify any bodies.
Sarkozy, speaking at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, said the cause is unclear and that "no hypothesis" is being excluded. He called it "a catastrophe like Air France has never before known."
"(I met with) a mother who lost her son, a fiancée who lost her future husband. I told them the truth," he said.
Sarkozy said "it will be very difficult" to find the plane because the zone where it is believed to have disappeared "is immense." He said France has asked for U.S. satellite help to locate the plane.
"What the French government is trying to get is any information which could have been gathered by a satellite system of U.S.," said Air France-KLM CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon.
Goelz, who participated in the search for TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996, fears this jet may never be found, reports Cordes.
"In TWA 800, we knew where the plane went down. We had a debris field. We had eyewitnesses. And it still took us four or five days to even find the beginnings of the wreckage field," said Goelz.
Chief Air France spokesman Francois Brousse said "it is possible" the plane was hit by lightning, but aviation experts expressed doubt that a bolt of lightning was enough to bring the plane down.
"They're built to take whatever Mother Nature can throw at them, especially electrically," Jack Casey, head of Safety Operating Systems, told Cordes.
Casey, a former airline pilot himself, has experienced multiple in-flight lightning strikes and explains that modern jetliners are equipped with redundant electrical systems, so if one goes bad, another should take over.
Without the kind of evidence that wreckage can provide, Goelz said theories about lightning bringing down the plane are simply "grasping for straws.
"You know, modern planes are designed to shed that kind of electricity," he told Early Show host Julie Chen. "Commercial aircraft are hit by lightning virtually every day, and they are not severely affected. But that's certainly one issue you're going to have to look at."
Air France's manager in Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Assuncao, told reporters that the two biggest groups of nationalities on board were Brazilian and French. Other passengers were American, Angolan, Argentine, Belgian, British, Chinese, Filipino, German, Irish, Italian, Moroccan, Norwegian, Spanish and Slovakian.
A State Department official confirmed two U.S. citizens were on board the flight. State Department officials were in touch with family members of the two individuals, according to CBS News reporter Charles Wolfson.
The Americans are Anne and Michael Harris, formerly of The Woodlands, Tex. The couple had been living in Rio de Janiero, where Michael Harris worked since July, reported CBS affiliate KHOU in Houston.
They were traveling to Paris for a training seminar for Michael, then a vacation, according to family members.
Air France Flight 447, a four-year-old Airbus A330, left Rio on Sunday at 7:03 p.m. local time (2203 GMT, 6:03 p.m. EDT) with 216 passengers and 12 crew members onboard, said company spokeswoman Brigitte Barrand.
The plane indicated it was still flying normally more than three hours later as it left Brazil radar contact, beyond the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, at 10:48 local time (9:48 p.m. EDT). It was flying at 35,000 feet and traveling at 522 mph.
About a half-hour later, the plane "crossed through a thunderous zone with strong turbulence." It sent an automatic message fourteen minutes later at 0214 GMT (10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday) reporting electrical failure and a loss of cabin pressure.
(CBS)Air France told Brazilian authorities the last information they heard was that automated message reporting a technical problem before the plane reached a monitoring station near the Cape Verde islands. Brazilian, African, Spanish and French air traffic controllers tried in vain to establish contact with the plane, the company said.
Brazilian Air Force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said seven aircraft had been deployed to search the area far off the northeastern Brazilian coast. Brazil's Navy sent three ships.
"We want to try to reach the last point where the aircraft made contact, which is about 745 miles northeast of Natal," Amaral told Globo TV.
Meteorologists said tropical storms over that part of the Atlantic are much more violent than thunderstorms in the United States and elsewhere.
"Tropical thunderstorms... can tower up to 50,000 feet. 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," Henry Margusity, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com, said in a statement.
In Washington, a Pentagon official said he'd seen no indication that terrorism or foul play was involved. He spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject.
In Brazil, sobbing relatives were flown to Rio de Janeiro, where Air France was assisting the families. Andres Fernandes, his eyes tearing up, said a relative "was supposed to be on the flight, but we need to confirm it," Globo TV reported.
At the Charles de Gaulle airport north of Paris, family members declined to speak to reporters and were brought to a cordoned-off crisis center.
Air France said it expressed "its sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of the passengers and crew members" aboard Flight 447. The airline did not explicitly say there were no survivors, leaving that subject to Sarkozy.
Air France-KLM CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said the pilot had 11,000 hours of flying experience, including 1,700 hours flying this aircraft.
Experts said the absence of a mayday call meant something happened very quickly.
"The conclusion to be drawn is that something catastrophic happened on board that has caused this airplane to ditch in a controlled or an uncontrolled fashion," Jane's Aviation analyst Chris Yates told The Associated Press. "Potentially it went down very quickly and so quickly that the pilot on board didn't have a chance to make that emergency call."
If all 228 people were killed, it would be the deadliest commercial airline disaster since Nov. 12, 2001, when an American Airlines jetliner crashed in the New York City borough of Queens during a flight to the Dominican Republic, killing 265 people. On Feb. 19, 2003, 275 people were killed in the crash of an Iranian military plane carrying members of the Revolutionary Guards as it prepared to land at Kerman airport in Iran.
The worst single-plane disaster was in 1985 when a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountainside after losing part of its tail fin, killing 520 people.
The Airbus A330-200 is a twin-engine, long-haul, medium-capacity passenger jet that can hold up to 253 passengers. There are 341 in use worldwide, flying up to 7,760 miles a trip.
Air France Plane Missing
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