Brazil Recovers Debris From Missing Aircraft

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Search Teams Converge on Presumed Air France Crash Zone

Brazilian air force aircraft on June 2 found signs of debris that could be from the missing Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The jet disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean during a thunderstorm on June 1, 2009, with 228 passengers and crew on board.

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French Prime Minister François Fillon told lawmakers Tuesday that the Atlantic waters in the search zone are up to 23,000 feet deep.

That Atlantic zone falls between normal radar coverage from either Brazil or West Africa, although contact remains via radio, authorities here said. Although the plane's position was known as of the final satellite messages, French officials and airline pilots noted that the plane could have plummeted directly into the water or flown on for hundreds of miles, making the search zone a long, broad path across the ocean between northeastern Brazil and far western Africa.

"This will be a long investigation," Bussereau said in a separate radio interview. "It could be several days, several weeks or several months."

Given the vastness of the ocean and the uncertainty about where the plane went down, the crash site might never be pinpointed, some experts said before the debris was sighted. The Pentagon dispatched a surveillance aircraft and an Air Force search-and-rescue team from a U.S. Southern Command air base in El Salvador.

French officials reportedly asked the Obama administration whether U.S. spy satellites or listening posts might provide clues to the fate of the jetliner.

"If an airplane went down in the mid-Atlantic, it could be very difficult to find any physical wreckage," said John Hansman, an aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The mid-oceans are one of the remotest parts of the world. It's like going to the North Pole."

French officials emphasized that they had no clear explanation for what happened to the plane. Bussereau said lightning alone was unlikely to cause such a sudden crash and suggested "a succession of extraordinary events" must have been responsible. "But we can't exclude anything, as we don't have any element at all," he added.

The plane had taken off Sunday night from Rio de Janeiro, bound for Paris. It carried 12 crew members and 216 passengers, a mix of nationalities reflecting the democratization of air travel: 61 French citizens and 58 Brazilians, but also nine Chinese, nine Italians, six Swiss, five British, five Lebanese, four Hungarians, two Americans and others from a total of 32 countries, from Estonia to Gambia to Morocco to the Philippines.

The crew made its last radio contact with a Brazilian control tower at 3:30 a.m. Paris time, about three hours after the routine takeoff from Brazil's Galeão-Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport, according to Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, Air France's chief executive.

Half an hour later it encountered a severe storm, including thunder, lightning and strong turbulence. Beginning at 4:14 a.m. Paris time, the aircraft emitted a series of automatic messages via satellite indicating that its electrical system was not functioning and that it had suffered a loss of cabin pressure.

Those were the final signals from the plane.

At the time, the Airbus was about 190 miles northeast of the Brazilian city of Natal, heading along its planned flight path toward the Cape Verde islands off West Africa, a course that should have brought it to Paris at 11:15 a.m., Air France said.