SAO PAULO — 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 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.
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 altitudes. 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
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Keller reported from Charles de Gaulle airport in Roissy, France. Associated Press reporters Emma Vandore, Laurent Lemel and Laurent Pirot in Paris; Marco Sibaja in Brasilia, Slobodan Lekic in Brussels, Belgium; Barry Hatton in Lisbon and Airlines and Transportation Editor Greg Stec in New York contributed to this report.
