Flight 447: Search Continues for Missing Air France Jet
An international search operation continues Tuesday for an Air France jetliner that vanished while flying during stormy weather over the Atlantic Ocean Monday.
Search planes from France, Brazil and Spain are looking for any signs of what happened to the Airbus A330 jet, which was carrying 228 people on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. They are searching a vast area more than a thousand kilometers off the northeastern coast of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archipelago.
Planes with special search equipment worked throughout the night.
Brazil has also dispatched military ships to the area where Air France Flight 447 may have crashed, but they will not arrive until Tuesday night or Wednesday.
Authorities say Flight 447 was proceeding normally for several hours after takeoff before moving out of radar contact range with Brazilian air controllers beyond the archipelago. The plane then transmitted an automatic message reporting an electrical failure. The messages were transmitted shortly after the Airbus A330 crossed through a tropical weather zone near the equator that frequently spawns strong turbulence and powerful thunderstorms.
Officials with Brazilian air carrier TAM say one of its pilots saw what appeared to be fire in the ocean while flying over the region where Air France Flight 447 may have vanished.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy went to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris Monday to offer his sympathy to passengers' families. He told reporters the chance of finding any survivors is very small.
Mr. Sarkozy said France has asked the United States to use its spy satellites and listening devices to help in the search effort.
Aviation experts say flight-recorder equipment aboard the Airbus automatically will broadcast a locator signal for 30 days, but that the ocean depths could sharply limit the signal's range.
Many of the plane's 216 passengers and 12 crew members were Brazilian, French or German citizens. Nationals from more than two dozen countries, including two people from the United States, also were aboard the commercial jet. The passenger list also included eight children, one of them an infant.
If no survivors are found, it would the worst disaster in Air France's history, and the deadliest since an Air France Concorde jet crashed during takeoff from Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport in 2000, killing all 109 passengers and crew, along with four people on the ground. It would also be the first fatal accident of an Airbus A330 jetliner since seven people were killed in a test flight in 1994 in southern France.
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