Hunt for Air France black boxes becomes priority after crash

Relatives and friends of Air France flight AF447 passengers at a crisis center in Rio de Janeiro

Charles Bremner in Paris

Brazilian military pilots yesterday found the wreckage in the Atlantic of the Air France Airbus that disappeared on Monday with 228 people on board.

After a 24-hour hunt by French and Brazilian aircraft, an air force Hercules C130 sighted debris that included an aircraft seat, small white pieces, an orange ball, a drum and traces of oil and kerosene. The wreckage was spread over 30 miles, about 290 miles off Fernando de Noronha Island. There were no signs of survivors.

Nelson Jobim, the Brazilian Defence Minister, citing the large amount of debris found in a three-mile path, said there was no doubt that the Airbus A330 had crashed. Bad weather was clearing and two French and two Dutch ships were expected in the area within hours.

The discovery was made within the zone where Flight 447 disappeared in heavy storms after computers reported a complete system failure to Air France’s Paris base. The four-year-old aircraft is believed to have plunged into the sea four hours into what should have been a ten-hour flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

When the ships arrive, search teams will concentrate on finding the black box flight recorders, which are equipped to transmit homing signals with a narrow range underwater. A robot submarine could then try to retrieve the recorders from the ocean floor.

There was no new clue to the cause of the worst disaster in Air France history. “No theory is favoured at the moment,” François Fillon, the Prime Minister, told Parliament after the assembly observed a minute’s silence. “Our only certainty is that there was no distress call from the plane but there were automatic alerts for three minutes, indicating that all the systems went out of action,” he added.

The sudden loss of communications and systems pointed to a catastrophic failure such as a break-up in flight or an explosion. This would be confirmed if the debris is found across a wide area. Speculation has focused on the heavy thunderstorms through which the aircraft was flying when it disappeared. Experts have suggested that the jet could have gone out of control in the centre of a towering thunderstorm. Jean-Louis Borloo, the Ecology Minister, who is in charge of transport, initially blamed lightning but then backtracked.

Yesterday, he said that terrorism had not been excluded, although at this stage nothing suggested that it could be the cause. “Our job is to go and look for the black boxes,” he said. The three-man flight crew, including a 58-year-old captain, were highly experienced and the aircraft “was of extreme reliability,” he added.

An ecumenical service in memory of the victims of 32 different nationalities is to be held in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris today. As well as 16 French crew, they included five Britons, 61 French and 58 Brazilians. The largest single group were ten Limoges-based salesmen from the CGE-Distribution company, along with their nine partners. The Government has offered to fly relatives to visit the area of the crash and President Sarkozy has invited them to the Elysée Palace next Monday.

The families met François Molins, the prosecutor handling the judicial inquiry into the accident. Mr Molins, a veteran of crash investigations, handled the case of the Air France Concorde that crashed after taking off from Paris in 2000.

The media has dubbed the disaster, Air France’s first since the Concorde, “The Mystery of Flight 447.” No airliner has vanished in mid-ocean without explanation for two decades. http://www.timesonline.co.uk