PARIS — An Air France passenger jet traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared after its electrical systems malfunctioned during a thunderstorm with heavy turbulence on Sunday evening, and officials said Monday that a search had begun for the wreckage in a vast swath of the Atlantic Ocean.
Relatives and friends waited on Monday at Galeão - Antonio Carlos Jobim airport in Rio de Janeiro to receive information about flight AF 447.
“We have received no news from Flight AF 447,” an Air France spokeswoman in Paris, Brigitte Barrand, said Monday.
The plane, an Airbus 330-200, was carrying 216 passengers, nine cabin crew members and three pilots, the airline said.
It took off from Galeão Airport in Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 Eastern time), and its last verbal communication with air traffic control was at 10:33 p.m., according to a statement from the Aeronautica, the agency in charge of Brazilian air space. At that time, the flight was at 35,000 feet and traveling 520 miles per hour.
About a half-hour later, the plane encountered an electrical storm with “very heavy turbulence,” Ms. Barrand said. The last communication from the plane was 14 minutes later — a series of automatic messages indicating that the aircraft had suffered an electrical-system malfunction, Air France officials said in Paris.
The chief Air France spokesman, Francois Brousse, said “it is possible” that the plane was hit by lightning, The Associated Press reported.
“A completely unexpected situation occurred on board the aircraft,” Pierre Henri Gourgeon, the Air France-KLM chief executive, told France’s LCI television.
Brazilian officials said the plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean between the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 186 miles northeast of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal, and Ilha do Sal, one of the Cape Verde islands off the coast of Africa. It is a huge area of ocean three times the size of Europe, officials said.
The Brazilian Air Force sent two planes to search for wreckage, an air force spokesman, Col. Henry Munhoz, told O Globo television in Brazil, and three ships from the Brazilian Navy were sent out. A French Air Force plane joined the search from a base in Senegal, Africa, as did a Spanish plane, news services reported.
The head of investigation and accident prevention for Brazil’s Civil Aeronautics Agency, Douglas Ferreira Machado, told O Globo that he calculated that, given its speed, the plane must have left Brazilian waters by the time contact was lost.
“It’s going to take a long time to carry out this search,” The A.P. quoted him as saying. “It could be a long, sad story. The black box will be at the bottom of the sea.”
The incident took place in a zone known to sailors and pilots as the ‘horse latitudes’ — an area of inter-tropical convergence close to the Equator particularly susceptible to storms and violent wind changes, said Julien Gourguechon, who has been an Air France pilot for a decade.
In the area, thunderstorms are possible at altitudes of up to 55,000 feet. Weather reports from the time of the incident indicated high clouds and isolated thunderstorms, CNN reported.
The plane was flying beyond the reach of Brazilian and Senegalese radar when it went missing — a gap that always occurs for aircraft on long trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights.
The automatic messages, which were possibly triggered by a number of alarms on the aircraft, were therefore likely received by satellite by the Air France maintenance system, Mr. Gourguechon said. He added that the cause of the plane’s “clearly exceptional” disappearance, apparently with no distress signal, was unlikely to be purely meteorological.
“Lightning alone is not enough to explain the loss of this plane,” he said. “Turbulence alone isn’t enough to explain it. It is always a combination of factors,” he said.
All jets are built to withstand severe turbulence, especially at upper flying levels, as well as to withstand lightning strikes. The missing aircraft was relatively new, having gone into service in April 2005. Its last maintenance check in the hangar took place on April 16, 2009, Air France said in a statement.
Pilots are trained to try to avoid flying directly through thunderstorms, and instead try to find an opening in a storm front through which to guide their plane. Ms. Barrand said that the pilot of the missing jet was very experienced, having clocked 11,000 flying hours, including 1,100 hours on Airbus 330 jets.
Air France's chief executive Pierre Henri Gourgeon spoke to reporters at the airline's headquarters, at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday.
The plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean near the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, Brazilian authorities said.
Planes have been brought down by lightning strikes in the past, though it is rare. In 1988, a twin-engine turboprop FA-4 was struck by lightning in the skies over Germany and crashed, killing all 21 people aboard. In 2006, a plane carrying Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, was struck by lightning and had to land, his spokeswoman said at the time.
Flight AF 447 was scheduled to arrive at Paris’s Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:10 a.m. local time. Stricken relatives, weeping or hiding behind dark sunglasses, descended on terminal 2D at Charles de Gaulle airport where the airline on Monday established a dedicated crisis cell, plus another in Rio. A black robed priest could be seen making his way past hordes of police, passengers and media to comfort relatives at Paris airport.
Air France did not release a passenger list, but said that the passengers were 126 men, 82 women, seven children and an infant. The French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, said that there were about 40 French on board. Maria Celina Rodrigues, the Brazilian consul general in Paris said there were 44 Brazilians on board, along with 21 Germans and a host of others nationalities, including Chinese.
One man at the airport in Paris, Luis Carlos Machado, 40, a policeman from Criciuma, Brazil, was waiting to take an Air France flight to Rio which had been delayed by the disruption. One of his colleagues, Deise Possamai, 34, was on the missing flight. He said he had been indirectly in contact with her parents and said they had given up all hope.
“It’s a really strange feeling to have to fly this route now,” he said.
French and Brazilian aviation authorities are expected to lead the investigation, but the United States National Transportation Safety Board may be involved if the plane had American-made engines or had any American passengers on board.
The A330 jet, which carries about 250 passengers, is a workhorse of long-distance aviation, used on routes where passenger demand was not big enough to warrant the use of the larger Boeing 777.
No Airbus 330-200 passenger flight has ever been involved in a fatal crash, according to the Aviation Safety Network, though the seven-person crew of a test flight died in a June 30, 1994, crash near Toulouse, France, where Airbus is based. The test was meant to simulate an engine failure at low speed with maximum angle of climb.
In October 2008, an A330 operated by Qantas on a flight from Singapore to Perth had to be diverted for an emergency landing near the Australian town of Exmouth after suddenly losing altitude. Dozens of passengers and crew members were injured.
Air France said that people in France seeking information about the flight could telephone 0800-800-812. For those calling from abroad, the number is 33-1-57-02-10-55
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The New York Times
Caroline Brothers reported from Paris, and Sharon Otterman from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alexei Barrionuevo from Buenos Aires, Micheline Maynard from New York, Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Andrew Downie from São Paulo, Brazil.
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