Air France Flight Missing, 228 Onboard Feared Dead

Military aircraft and warships from France and Brazil were combing the equatorial Atlantic a desperate quest to find the wreckage of an Air France jet that disappeared with more than 200 people on board, ­including five Britons, after ­hitting treacherous midnight weather off Brazil.

The Airbus A330 ploughed into ­thunderstorms and heavy turbulence four hours into an overnight flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris early today. ­Fifteen minutes later, the aircraft reported ­electrical faults through an ­automated message. Then nothing.

In total 61 French people and 58 ­Brazilians were among the passengers on board AF flight 447, as well as 18 Germans and at least a dozen other nationalities. Seven children and a baby were aboard, as well as 12 French crew. There were slim hopes of survivors.

"It's a tragic accident. The chances of finding survivors are tiny," said a sombre French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport.

Search and rescue efforts were ­complicated by the vastness of the ocean and uncertainty over the precise time the jet went down. Brazilian teams ­concentrated on an area north of ­Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago 217 miles (350km) off Brazil, while the French military scoured the west Atlantic near the Cape Verde islands hundreds of miles away.

Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the chief executive officer of Air France, later said search teams would focus on an area of a few dozen nautical miles roughly midway between Brazil and Africa. France also asked the US for satellite data to help with the search.

One theory was that the aircraft could have been hit by lightning, but Air France said several of the plane's mechanisms had probably malfunctioned.

Pilots and aviation experts said that lightning and turbulence were both ­common experiences which rarely brought a plane down.

"Planes are routinely hit by lightning," said Kieran Daly of Air Transport ­Intelligence. "It should not matter. ­However … it can burn out electrical components. .Also if a fire started then that is not a good thing and could go undetected for a time, causing more damage."

If no survivors are found, the crash will be Air France's ­deadliest accident, eclipsing the Concorde crash in Paris almost nine years ago in which 109 ­people were killed.



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