Aircraft Debris Found in the Atlantic

by Philippe Naughton

Search teams scouring the Atlantic Ocean for the Air France jet which came down in a storm yesterday have found debris from an aircraft.

The Brazilian air force said "small remains" were located 650km (400 miles) northeast of the Fernando do Noronha archipelago in the area where the jet is thought to have crashed. The flight disappeared early yesterday after flying into a storm, four hours into its scheduled 11-hour flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the Air France chief executive, said that the last contact with the plane came in a flurry of about a dozen automatically-generated technical messages "indicating that several systems had broken down...a completely unheard-of situation".

A daytime search by eight Brazilian air force aircraft doing visual sweeps did not turn up anything. The search continued overnight with a transport aircraft fitted with equipment to detect the plane's emergency beacon and another with onboard radar and infrared gear that could detect bodies in the water.

President Sarkozy said yesterday that the chances of anyone surviving appeared "very slim" and Air France is coming to terms with the worst loss of life in its history and the worst civilian air accident anywhere since 2001.