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Listen to Locke!
This is crazy. They went through a storm and they never heard from the pilots or anything. No May Day call, just an automated signal of electrical problems from the computer on board. I guess it's possible that everyone died in the air or something because of lightning or loss of cabin pressure.
SAO PAULO, Brazil — A missing Air France jet carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris ran into a towering wall of thunderstorms over the Atlantic Ocean, officials said Monday, fearing that all aboard were lost.
The area where the plane could have gone down was vast, in the middle of very deep Atlantic Ocean waters between Brazil and the coast of Africa. Brazil's military searched for it off its northeast coast, while the French military scoured the ocean near the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy told families of those aboard that "prospects of finding survivors were very small." If all 228 were killed, it would be the deadliest commercial airline disaster since 2001.
Sarkozy, speaking at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, said the reason for the disappearance remained unclear and that "no hypothesis" was excluded.
"(I met with) a mother who lost her son, a fiancee 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 help from U.S. satellites to locate the plane.
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.
Air France's manager in Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Assuncao, told reporters that the two biggest groups of nationalities aboard were Brazilian and French. Other passengers were American, Angolan, Argentine, Belgian, British, Chinese, Filipino, German, Irish, Italian, Moroccan, Norwegian, Spanish and Slovakian.
Air France Flight 447, a 4-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 on board, said company spokeswoman Brigitte Barrand.
The plane left Brazil radar contact, beyond the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, at 10:48 local time (0148 GMT, 9:48 p.m. EDT), indicating it was flying normally at 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) and traveling at 522 mph (840 kph).
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.
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 Air Force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said seven aircraft had been deployed to search the area far off the northeastern Brazilian coast.
"We want to try to reach the last point where the aircraft made contact, which is about 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) northeast of Natal," Amaral told Globo TV.
Meteorologists said tropical storms are much more violent than thunderstorms in the United States and elsewhere.
"Tropical thunderstorms ... can tower up to 50,000 feet (15,240 meters). At the al ude 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.
Brazil's Navy said it was sending three ships to search waters about 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) from Natal.
Portuguese air control authorities say the missing plane did not make contact with controllers in Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores Islands nor, as far as they know, with other Atlantic air traffic controllers in Cape Verde, Casablanca, or the Canary islands.
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.
Sobbing relatives of people aboard the plane arrived at an airport in Sao Paulo to fly on to Rio de Janeiro, where Air France was assisting relatives. 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 who had arrived to meet passengers refused 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, but allowed Sarkozy address the issue for them.
Air France-KLM CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, at a news conference, said the plane's 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."
But aviation experts said the risk the plane was brought down by lightning was slim.
"Lightning issues have been considered since the beginning of aviation. They were far more prevalent when aircraft operated at low al udes. They are less common now since it's easier to avoid thunderstorms," said Bill Voss, president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, Alexandria, Va.
He said planes have specific measures built in to help dissipate electricity along the aircraft's skin, and are tested for resistance to big electromagnetic shocks and equipped to resist them. He said the plane should be found, because it has backup locators that should continue to function even in deep water.
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.
Airbus would not further comment until more details emerged.
"Our thoughts are with the passengers and with the families of the passengers," said Airbus spokeswoman Maggie Bergsma.
She said it was the first fatal accident of a A330-200 since a test flight in 1994 went wrong, killing seven people in Toulouse.
The Airbus A330-200 is a twin-engine, long-haul, medium-capacity passenger jet that is 190 feet (58.8 meters) long. It is a shortened version of the standard A330, and can hold up to 253 passengers. There are 341 in use worldwide today. It can fly up to 7,760 miles (12,500 kilometers).
Rick Kennedy, a spokesman for GE Aviation, expressed doubt that the engine was at fault. He said the CF6-80E engine that powered the Air France plane "is the most popular and reliable engine that we have for big airplanes in the world." He said there are more than 15,000 airplanes flying in the world with that engine design.
The prospect of finding any survivors is very weak
Listen to Locke!
I was so going to make a similar post. Good job.
Yeah, this is very strange. Im still wondering. They havent found them yet right? Exactly, makes you think about lost a bit
shouldnt their have been some "debris" from the plane seen somewhere in the water by now..... its been daylight for hours now?
Ahahahaha, 228 people died earlier today, let's make a joke about a TV show while the wound is still fresh!
I was so going to make a similar post. Good job.
Wow and you told me to stop being so sensitive? Give me a ing break ES.
Oh noes, 238 people! What ever was I thinking making jokes on such a serious forum!
Someone must have kicked you in the nuts today. Your seriously grouchy.
Most pilots will fly around storms. But this airliners just happens to fly through a storm and gets hit by lightning over the Atlantic and disappears?
Sounds fishy to me. A contrived cover story to mask a terrorist hit?
Coming From Twitter: the aliens made the plane dissappear, and have all the victims are alive but are on an alien planet getting tests run on them.
That's awful. I worry about that kinda stuff since my daughter is flying to Germany via Dublin this Thursday. I'm praying fast & furious that all her flights are uneventful.
So, you're saying there's a point where it'll be ok to make jokes about it? When is that, exactly?
For the record, I'm fine with the joke. I laughed at the Locke thing, and those jokes don't bother me. But, you're insinuating that there's a point where it goes from taboo to acceptable. I'm just wondering what the official waiting time is.
there should be no jokes in this thread.
terrible and sad.
Boeing > Airbus
ing somali pirates
They lost contact with it right off the waters of Brazil, and the automated thing came from when it should have been off the coast of Africa- so the space they are searching is basically the entire Atlantic Ocean. It just happened this morning so it would take awhile, if they ever find it. They said that the stuff could sink and they may never find the stuff because it's the deepest part of the Atlantic.
I just think about how scary that must be to be in that kind of position knowing you are above water and there is nothing you can do.
As long as you are not in an Airbus, you are fine
When I first read about this on the internet this morning, I thought about Lost. It's a sucky thing to happen. I hope the families of the victims sue the airlines. No excuses for an airplane to disappear. It would be awesome if the passengers and crew on the plane weren't dead. A happy ending to this story would be nice but I don't think it's gonna happen.
I just read in a brazillian news site that a pilot claims to have seen "orange dots" floating in the sea, in the search area. So they believe that there might be survivors.
This is tragic, no matter how you look at it. Very eerie too.
I just read, that a ship has seen pieces of the aircraft.
This is quite tragic ...
I see no survivors with this crash.
My heart and prayers go out to the loss of loved ones.
They did not believe there might be survivors. Since the orange dots, they thought they were pieces of the aircraft in fire. Just now, they found other pieces and even seats of the airplane.
Err... based on what I read, the "orange dots," if they were anything related to the crash, would have been bits of flaming wreckage, as opposed to life rafts. So I don't see how that would imply the possibility of survivors.
Debris has been spotted along the flight path is being reported by Brazilian authorities.
Air France just said there was no hope of finding survivors anymore.
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