Brazil confirms Air France jet crashed in ocean

[almaty 19]

lol...it would be the same chances

[Marina-Del 10]

I'd reckon that you have a better chance of winning the lottery

[Niels Bohr 72]

There's more plane problems these past two years. It seems these planes are reaching their age for replacements!

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

lol...it would be the same chances

Yeah but only because there's no drawing today. Otherwise, the odds of cracking the jackpot would be far better than the odds of finding any survivors of AF447.

[Mrs.J06 4]

There's more plane problems these past two years. It seems these planes are reaching their age for replacements!

The plane was just 4 years old!

It must be so terrible for the families not to know for sure what happened... how can you let go if you never find out?

[scandal 951]

Update.....

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...oryId=104776407

2 bodies, ticket found near Air France crash site

from The Associated Press

RECIFE, Brazil June 6, 2009, 01:40 pm ET · Searchers have found two bodies in the Atlantic Ocean near where an Air France jet is believed to have crashed, a Brazilian military official said Saturday.

Air force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said searchers also recovered a leather briefcase with an Air France ticket for the flight inside of it.

"It was confirmed with Air France that the ticket number corresponds to a passenger on the flight," he said.

Flight 447 disappeared Sunday with 228 people on board and officials believe there were no survivors.

The two male bodies were recovered Saturday morning about 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of where Air Flight 447 emitted its last signals — roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast.

"At 9:10 a.m., a ship spotted the first body," Amaral said. "The body was recovered and it was confirmed to be male."

The second body was spotted and recovered around 11:30 a.m. (1430 GMT).

[Nagishkaw 510]

My God !

[Ladylethal 12]

Yeah, they found the first bodies and a suitcase and bag that had Air France tickets that correspond to Flight 477 and also it seems the ID tag on the backpack correspond to a passenger of that flight.

From what I understand despite people bashing the brazilian air force at first for announcing the debris first found belonged to the jet and turning out not to it seems they were indeed in the right spot and it's just that the currents drag trash from all over and not just from the plane. My guess is that at this point they must have recovered more stuff that they've yet to announce (they did find a blue seat and are matching the specification number to those of the plane).

But I find it hard to believe they'll be able to recover most of the plane or the black box.

[MrsCat 6]

\Maybe profits have been been down the last two years (high fuel prices, decreased air travel) and scheduled maintenance is taking a hit? Broken parts that may be replaced are waiting until they must be replaced?

Edited June 6, 2009 by MrsCat

[Ladylethal 12]

It seems this A330 was up to date in maintenance.

[yogib37 3]

\Maybe profits have been been down the last two years (high fuel prices, decreased air travel) and scheduled maintenance is taking a hit? Broken parts that may be replaced are waiting until they must be replaced?

well that part that is supposed to be 'broken' is a very crictical part. If it was acting not normal on the ground, that would make the plane unairworthly. If it just malfunction in the air that would suck.

It could be why the plane did disapear. If the plane was giving false information, and was going faster then it should, it could break up do to it was not design for excess speed.

[mawilson 2,133]

How the #### can a plane disappear?

Don't they have GPS trackers?

[Amby 490]

How the #### can a plane disappear?

Don't they have GPS trackers?

I was watching a program the other day and they said that due to the depth of the ocean, the boat or whatever they use to find the black box (the part with GPS on it) would basically have to be directly over it because the signal only reaches so far. I think they said it sends out a signal for 30 days.

[Big Papa Zone 93]

Being the "Air Crash Investigation" geek that I am, I'm telling you right now that the cause of this crash was faulty air speed indications due to blocked peto tubes. I'm guessing that the overspeed warning sounded in the cockpit, thus prompting the pilots to throttle back, when in fact the plane was not going too fast at all. This resulted in a fatal stall, and the plane nosedived into the sea.

I'd put everything I own on it. Seriously.

[panamania79 2]

By FEDERICO ESCHER and ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press Writers Federico Escher And Alan Clendenning, Associated Press Writers – 52 mins ago

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil – Brazilian military planes found a 3-mile (5-kilometer) path of wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean, confirming that an Air France jet carrying 228 people crashed in the sea, Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said Tuesday. Jobim told reporters in Rio de Janeiro that the discovery "confirms that the plane went down in that area," hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.

"There isn't the slightest doubt that the debris is from the Air France plane," Jobim said.

He said the strip of wreckage included metallic and nonmetallic pieces, but did not describe them in detail. No bodies were spotted in the crash of the Airbus A330 in which all aboard are believed to have died.

The discovery came just hours after authorities announced they had found an airplane seat, an orange buoy and signs of fuel in a part of the Atlantic Ocean where ocean depths range from less than 1,610 meters (one mile) to more than 4,800 meters (three miles).

Jobim said recovery of the plane's cockpit voice and data recorders and other wreckage could be difficult because much of the wreckage sank.

"It's going to be very hard to search for it because it could be at a depth of 2,000 meters or 3,000 meters (1.2 miles to 1.8 miles) in that area of the ocean," Jobim said.

The initial discovery of wreckage announced before Jobim spoke came about 36 hours after the jet went missing as it flew from Rio de Janeiro toward Paris.

A Brazilian air force spokesman said the two spots where debris was located suggested the pilots may have tried to turn the plane around to return to Fernando de Noronha.

"The locations where the objects were found are toward the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," said the spokesman, Col. Jorge Amaral. "That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis."

Amaral said some of the debris was white and small, but did not describe it in more detail.

Jobim made the announcement after two commercial ships that joined the search late Tuesday morning reached sites where the debris was found, a Navy spokeswoman said.

"Once they come across the objects, they will be analyzed to determine if they are parts of the plane or just junk," she said.

A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane and 21 crew members arrived in Brazil on Tuesday morning from El Salvador and was to begin overflying the zone in the afternoon, U.S. officials said in a statement. The plane can fly low over the ocean for about 12 hours at a time and has radar and sonar designed to track submarines underwater.

The French dispatched a research ship equipped with unmanned submarines to the debris site. The subs can explore depths of up to 19,600 feet (6,000 meters). The U.S. was considering contributing unmanned underwater vehicles in the search as well, according to a defense source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

The 4-year-old plane was last heard from at 0214 GMT Monday (10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday) about four hours after it left Rio.

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 the New York City borough of Queens that killed 265 people.

Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the plane down, with few clues to go on. Potential causes include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors.

The crew made no distress call before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost cabin pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of feet (meters) below the surface.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that if the debris is confirmed to be part of Flight 447, "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 (22,966 feet)," he told lawmakers in the lower house of French parliament Tuesday. Black box recorders can emit signals for up to 30 days.

The chance of finding survivors now "is very, very small, even nonexistent," said Jean-Louis Borloo, the French minister overseeing transportation.

The Airbus A330-200 was cruising normally at 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) and 522 mph (840 kph) just before it disappeared.

But just north of the equator, a line of towering thunderstorms loomed. Bands of extremely turbulent weather stretched across the Atlantic toward Africa.

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.

"There really had to be a succession of extraordinary events to be able to explain this situation," Borloo said on RTL radio Tuesday.

France's junior minister for transport, Dominique Bussereau, said the plane sent "a kind of outburst" of automated messages just before it disappeared, "which means something serious happened, as eventually the circuits switched off."

French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said France has three military patrol aircraft flying over the central Atlantic, but could shift its search operations closer to the site of the Brazilian discovery. He said an AWACS radar plane also had been dispatched and should join the operation on Wednesday.

French police were studying passenger lists and maintenance records, and preparing to take DNA from passengers' relatives to help identify any bodies.

French Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" of terrorism, but 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 France's accident investigation team.

President Barack Obama told French television stations the United States is ready to do everything necessary to find out what happened.

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.

Two Americans living in Rio de Janeiro were on board. Michael Harris, 60, a geologist, and his wife Anne, 54, were headed to Europe for work and vacation. They lived previously in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Among the passengers were three young Irish doctors, returning from a two-week vacation in Brazil. Aisling Butler's father John paid tribute to his 26-year-old daughter, from Roscrea, County Tipperary.

"She was a truly wonderful, exciting girl. She never flunked an exam in her life — nailed every one of them — and took it all in her stride," he said.

___

Alan Clendenning reported from Sao Paulo. Associated Press writers Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo; Marco Sibaja in Brasilia; and Angela Charlton, Emma Vandore, Jean-Pierre Verges and Laurent Joan-Grange in Paris contributed to this report.