Rio De Janeiro: Massive search operations are on to locate the whereabouts of an Air France plane – with 228 people on board - that disappeared over the Atlantic, but little hope remained that any of 228 people on board would be found alive.
The Pentagon has said it had dispatched a surveillance aircraft and an Air Force search and rescue team to try to locate an Air France passenger jet believed to have crashed in the Atlantic Ocean.
According to agency reports, two Spanish aircraft joined the search for an Air France passenger jet that is believed to have crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, the government said.
A reconnaissance plane from Spain's paramilitary Civil Guard police force left the Senegalese capital of Dakar where it was taking part in a European operation against illegal immigration.
MYSTERY DEEPENS
There was no word from the pilots, no sign that anything was wrong with Air France Flight 447 as it streaked over the dark waters of the Atlantic on its way to Paris. And then it was gone.
All it left behind was automated pings signaling that something had gone wrong. The plane had been battling through ferocious thunderstorms. But what caused one of the world's safest passenger jets with 228 passengers and crew to vanish over a vast expanse of ocean might never be known.
"It's like going into a black hole," said Robert Ditchey, a Los Angeles aviation consultant and co-founder of America West, now US Airways. "The airplane is pretty much on its own. It's hours away from help."
The disappearance of the Airbus A330 jet has fueled speculation that lightning, faulty electronics or pilot error could have brought the plane down. A navigation device used on the same type of plane recently malfunctioned on two flights, causing one to lose control.
One thing is certain: The investigation figures to be complex, made more vexing by the possible difficulties of finding wreckage that either has sunk to the bottom of the sea or dispersed over hundreds of miles of water.
The plane probably was traveling about 500 mph and the pilots were checking in with traffic control about every half hour, meaning that the search area probably includes hundreds of square miles of open ocean.
According to European investigators, the last voice communication came when it was near Fernando de Noronha Island, about 200 miles off Brazil's coast. The missing airliner was about to enter Senegal's air traffic control space when it vanished.
The 216 passengers included 126 men, 82 women, seven children and one infant. The crew included three pilots and nine flight attendants. On Monday night, search aircraft looked for signs of the plane in the Atlantic Ocean about halfway between the Brazilian and African coasts.
Brazilian Vice President Jose Alencar said he had received information that the pilot of another airliner had seen glowing spots, possibly fire, in the sea more or less at the time the Air France plane had disappeared.
Pilots flying a commercial jet from Paris to Rio de Janeiro for Brazil's largest airline, TAM, spotted what they thought was fire in the ocean along the Air France jet's route early Monday, the airline said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.
Brazilian Air Force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said authorities were investigating the report, according to the Agencia Brasil official news service.
"There is information that the pilot of a TAM aircraft saw several orange points on the ocean while flying over the region ... where the Air France plane disappeared," Amaral said. "After arriving in Brazil, the pilot found out about the disappearance (of the Air France plane) and said that he thought those points on the ocean were fire."
Investigators have been particularly baffled by lack of any sign of distress or communications from the pilots before it vanished.
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"This was so catastrophic, no signals, no nothing. Then bang, it is gone," said Robert E. Breiling, an air safety expert in Boca Raton, Fla.
Airline officials said the Air France plane transmitted numerous automated messages of system failures. Officials Monday were unable to determine whether any of the failures caused the plane's disappearance.
According to federal data, only 6 percent of commercial airliner accidents occur during the cruise phase of the flight. Accidents during landing and approaches account for 65 percent of the crashes.
One of the most urgent tasks for Air France investigators is to locate the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, known as black boxes, which could be thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. Those devices have sonar beacons that can operate as deep as 20,000 feet, according to manufacturers.
"This accident occurred in the intertropical convergence zone, which is a breeding ground for thunder storms and cyclones," said Thomas Anthony, director of the University of Southern California's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "If you look at satellite imagery, you can see lines and lines of thunderstorms sometimes that stretch for hundreds and hundreds of miles. You can see tops of thunderstorms in the 55,000- to 60,000-foot range.
Initial speculation centered around the possibility of a lightning strike, but safety experts said planes are built to withstand such strikes. The metal in the fuselage and the wings conduct electricity and keep the lightning from damaging the plane, said Vladimir Rakov, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida and a leading expert on lightning.
In fact, Rakov said on average that each commercial plane is hit by lightning about once a year. In pilot terms, "lightening strikes a commercial jet once for every 10,000 hours in the air, but most strikes cause no significant damage because the lightning current flows harmlessly across the metal skin of the aircraft," he said.
Even if lightning did damage the plane's electrical system, the modern aircraft is built with multiple backups in case of an electrical failure, said Hans Weber, president of Tecop International Inc., an aviation technology consulting company in San Diego.
On Monday, experts were digging into two recent incidents involving the same Airbus model in which an electronic system failed, in one case causing a plane to dip uncontrollably while at cruising altitude, injuring 70 passengers. The pilot was able to regain control and land safely at a nearby airport.
The electronic equipment, known as Air Data Inertial Reference Unit, determines the planes' speed and location. European aviation authorities issued an emergency airworthiness directive in January alerting A330 operators who had the unit installed on their planes to follow revised operating procedures.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued its own directive in March, saying that the equipment failure "could result in high pilot workload, deviation from the intended flight path, and possible loss of control of the airplane."
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