Search on for Crashed Air France Plane
Starting from night, French and Brazilian militaries ships and aircraft continued to seek out the wreckage of an Air France jet that reported crashed in Atlantic Ocean on Sunday evening during a flight from Brazil to France.
According to Air France statement, the airbus A330-200, with 216 passengers and a crew of 12 on board, obviously plummeted in a violent cloudburst after encountering “very heavy turbulence”.
French officials said that military reconnaissance planes have been sent from Senegal in West Africa to check reports from a Brazilian civilian airliner’s pilot that he had seen “orange dots” – perhaps the glow of some burning wreckage – on the ocean surface along the French Plane’s expected flight route.
However, Christophe Prazuck, a French military spokesman, said that it was “very unlikely” that anyone survived the crash.
“We will search all night long and keep going through dawn,” said Colonel Jorge Amaral of the Brazilian Air Force, quoted by the news service Agencia Brasil. “We have to work as if it were possible to find survivors.”
Air France said that the passengers of the place included people of 32 nationalities, of them, 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians and 26 Germans.
Air France Flight 447 encountered bad weather and turbulence about four hours after takeoff from Rio, and the company said that an automated warning system on the 4-year-old plane beamed out a message about electrical problems 15 minutes later. The signals were not sent as distress calls, and they were not read for hours, until air traffic controllers realized that the plane’s crew had not radioed in on schedule.
