Air France Official: 'We Can Fear the Worst'
Plane Headed to Paris With 228 on Board Goes Missing Over the Atlantic
By LISA STARK, AMMU KANNAMPILLY and KATE BARRETT
June 1, 2009
As authorities braced for the worst, search teams in helicopters, airplanes and on a patrol ship are scouring the Atlantic Ocean today for a missing Air France plane that was carrying 228 people — including two U.S. passengers and those representing more than 30 countries — when it disappeared Sunday on its way from Rio de Janiero to Paris.
Grim search is underway after a jumbo jet disappears over the Atlantic.
Brazilian searchers are focused on the Fernando de Noronha archipelago off the coast of northeast Brazil, about 1,500 miles from Rio, and French teams are looking for the plane off the coast of Africa.
But the prospects of finding any survivors from the 4-year-old Airbus A330 are "very small," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said today.
He added that "no hypothesis is excluded" in the search for causes of the disappearance of the flight on which most of the passengers were French and Brazilian.
Several heavy thunderstorms were present in the area Sunday night where the plane disappeared with apparently no time for the pilots to give a Mayday call, officials said.
"When you get to the top of these storms, you can encounter a very unusual kind of wind pattern that can cause the plane to bounce up and down, cause turbulence essentially, in addition to the threat of lightening," Ken Reeves, AccuWeather.com's director of forecasting operations told ABC News today.
In France, Sarkozy was not the only government official to strike a somber tone. "We can fear the worst," Dominique Bussereau, France's transportation minister, told Europe-1 radio.
An Air France spokesperson told ABC News earlier today that the airline was "without any news from Air France Flight 447 from Rio to Paris with 216 passengers on board and a crew of 12 people … three pilots and nine flight attendants. Air France is very concerned about the emotions and worries of the families involved."
The flight had been expected to land in Paris today at 5:15 a.m. ET. after leaving Rio around 6 p.m. Sunday night.
The head of Air France, Pierre Henri Gourgeon, told reporters at a news conference that the plane's last radio contact with Brazilian air control was at 9:30 p.m. ET.
Meanwhile, France's Environment Minister Jean Louis Borloo brushed off rumors of a hijacking, telling reporters that the plane probably suffered an accident of some kind.
