Air France Aircraft Disappears off Radar

[atpcliff]

Hi.

Just saw this via google, but saw no posts here.

The plane, from Rio to Paris, was lost to radar shortly after takeoff.

Does anyone have any info???

It does not sound good.

cliff
NBO

 

[J.Otto]

doesnt sound good. just looked at a cnn article. not much in the way of existing details.

 

[Airboss]

Air France Rio-Paris flight missing with 228 aboard

15 mins ago
PARIS (Reuters) – An Air France plane on its way from Brazil to Paris has gone missing with 228 people on board, the airline said on Monday.
Its last known location was unclear. Brazilian television said the Brazilian air force had started a search mission over the Atlantic Ocean for the plane.
Flight AF 447 has 216 passengers and 12 crew on board. It left Rio de Janeiro on Sunday at 7 p.m. local time and was expected in Paris on Monday at 11:15 a.m. (5:15 a.m. EDT).
"Air France regrets to announce that it is without news from flight AF 447, which was flying on the Rio de Janeiro - Paris Charles de Gaulle route and was scheduled to arrive at 11.15 a.m. today (5:15 a.m. EDT)," an Air France spokesman said.
An Air France-KLM spokeswoman in Amsterdam said there had been no radio contact with the missing plane "for a while."
The plane was an Airbus 330-200, according to the Paris airports authority website.
Air France said relatives of people traveling on board flight AF 447 were being taken care of in a special area of Charles de Gaulle airport.
(Reporting by Jean-Baptiste Vey, Gerard Bon, Astrid Wendlandt and Tim Hepher; writing by Estelle Shirbon; editing by Crispian Balmer and Angus MacSwan)

 

[JFReservist]

Just did a crossing two days ago from Spain... I kept thinking how much water there was down there, with very little options. God Bless them.

 

[mynameisjim]

It's not often that the fate of an airliner is unknown. It makes me imagine what it must have been like years ago when it was more common to not know what happened.

 

[amt]

The Airbus 330-200 had been expected to arrive in Paris at 1110 local time (0910 GMT).

Tom Symonds, BBC News transport correspondent



The Airbus A330 airliner is likely to have begun its journey tracking the coast of Brazil northwards before striking out across the Atlantic. A few hundred miles from the shore, radar coverage peters out -- from there on, crews use high frequency radio to report their position.
The Brazilian Air Force says the plane left radar screens near the islands of Fernando de Noronha, 230 miles from the coast. The firmest clue to its fate comes from the data message sent via a satellite network at 0214 GMT reporting electrical and pressurisation problems. This suggests whatever happened, happened before the crew could put out a mayday radio call. It was likely a sudden and catastrophic emergency. Even a double engine failure at cruising altitude would normally give the crew around half an hour's gliding time.
Air France says the plane may have been struck by lightning - the cause of around a dozen major air crashes in the last 50 years - but it rarely results in tragedy. More likely lightning damaged electrical systems, possibly leading indirectly to the plane's ditching.
Although passengers survived a landing on the Hudson River in New York in January -- its rarely successful, especially in the middle of an ocean the size of the Atlantic.



It made its last radio contact at 0133 GMT (2233 Brazilian time) when it was 565km (360m) off Brazil's north-eastern coast, Brazil's air force said.
The crew said they were planning to enter Senegalese airspace at 0220 GMT and that the plane was flying normally at an altitude of 10,670m (35,000ft) and a speed of 840km/h (520mph).
At 0220, when Brazilian air traffic controllers saw the plane had not made its required radio call saying it was crossing into Senegalese airspace, air traffic control in the Senegalese capital was contacted.
At 0530 GMT, Brazil's air force launched a search-and-rescue mission, sending out a coast guard patrol plane and a specialised air force rescue aircraft.
"The plane might have been struck by lightning - it's a possibility," Francois Brousse, head of communications at Air France, told reporters in Paris.
Douglas Ferreira Machado, head of investigation and accident prevention for Brazil's Civil Aeronautics Agency, said the search would take "a long time".
"It could be a long, sad story," he told Brazil's Globo news. "The black box will be at the bottom of the sea."
France's minister responsible for transportation, Jean-Louis Borloo, ruled out hijacking as a cause of the plane's loss.
'No information'
An Air France official told AFP that people awaiting the flight would be received in a special area at Charles de Gaulle airport's second terminal.

Tearful relatives and friends were led away by airport staff after they arrived expecting to greet passengers.
About 20 relatives of passengers on board the flight arrived at Rio's international airport on Monday morning seeking information.
Bernardo Souza, who said his brother and sister-in-law were on the flight, complained he had received no details from Air France.
"I had to come to the airport but when I arrived I just found an empty counter," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.
"With a lack of information, it is even more worrying."
Air France has opened a telephone hotline for friends and relatives of people on the plane - 00 33 157021055 for callers outside France and 0800 800812 for inside France.
This is the first major incident in Brazilian air space since a Tam flight crashed in Sao Paulo in July 2007 killing 199 people.

 

[clr4theapch]

Hopefully, they were able to ditch and save many in rafts... anyone have the weather and their flight plan routing?? I would assume that the waters are very warm, Prayers to them all..

 

[FL000]

The adage "no news is good news" definitely does not apply here. I feel bad for the families waiting to hear something...anything. That's gotta be difficult.

 

[Crossky]

This link is a pretty good IMO Meteorological analysis of the conditions present where AF447 went down at:

Tim Vasquez Weather site

His opinion is the cause of the accident was that the aircraft was subject to severe turbulence. God speed.

 

[atpcliff]

Hi.

Heard the messages sent said electrical failure and loss of pressurization.

God Bless everyone associated.

cliff
NBO

 

[amt]

The Airbus A330-200, registration F-GZCP, left Rio on 31 May at 730pm local time (1230am in Paris).

The aircraft hit a zone of stormy weather with strong turbulence at 2am this morning (universal time), i.e. 4am in Paris. An automatic message was received from the aircraft at 2:14am (4 :14am in Paris) indicating a failure in the electric circuit a long way from the coast.

The Brazilian, African, Spanish and French air traffic control centres all tried to make contact with flight AF 447 but to no avail. The French military air traffic control centre tried to detect the aircraft but did not succeed.

216 passengers were on board: 126 men, 82 women, 7 children and one infant.

There were 12 flight crew members: 3 pilots and 9 flight attendants.

The flight captain had a record of 11,000 flight hours and had already flown 1,700 hours on Airbus A330/A340s.

Of the two first officers, one had flown 3,000 flight hours (800 of which on the Airbus A330/A340) and the other 6,600 (2,600 on the Airbus A330/A340).

The aircraft was powered by General Electric CF6-80E engines.

The aircraft had totalled 18,870 flight hours and went into service on 18 April 2005.
Its last maintenance check in the hangar took place on 16 April 2009.

 

[amt]

Brazilian aircraft searching for an Air France jet which went missing with 228 people aboard in an Atlantic storm have spotted debris on the ocean. Some oil, a plane seat and other items were sighted 650km (400 miles) north-east of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha island, the Brazilian air force said.
The find can only be confirmed once the items are retrieved and the first boat is not due to arrive until Wednesday.

Col Jorge Amaral Brazilian air force spokesman said the debris had been spotted by search planes early on Tuesday.
"At approximately 0530 Brazilian time [0830 GMT], a C-130 military aircraft spotted some debris in two locations approximately 60km apart from each other," he said.
"In this area, they saw an orange buoy, an airplane seat, small white pieces, an airplane turbine as well as oil and kerosene.
"The search is continuing because it's very little material in relation to the size [of the Airbus A330]."
Officials, he said, needed "a piece that might have a serial number, some sort of identification" to be sure it came from the missing jet.
Two Lufthansa jets, which were in the same area as the Air France plane half an hour before it vanished, may provide clues as to what happened, the UN weather agency says.

Brazilian air force's Col Jorge Amaral confirming the sighting - translated

Plane crews from Brazil, France and other countries had narrowed their search to a zone half-way between Brazil and west Africa, hoping to pick up signals from the Airbus's beacons.
Col Amaral was also quoted by the Associated Press as saying a life jacket had been spotted amid the debris.
"The locations where the objects were found are towards the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," he told reporters in Rio.
"That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis."
Searchers now planned to focus their efforts on collecting the debris and trying to identify it, he said.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that if the Brazilian reports were confirmed, they would help narrow the search area.

"This is a race against time which has begun in extremely difficult meteorological conditions and in a zone where the sea bed is up to 7,000m deep," he told the French parliament.
He added that the cause of the plane's loss had still to be established.
"Our only certainty is that the plane did not send out any distress call but regular automatic alerts for three minutes indicating the failure of all systems," he said.
A French search plane flying out of Senegal on Monday was hindered by stormy conditions over the ocean.
Spanish and Senegalese aircraft have also been involved in the search effort.

Electrical failures
The two Lufthansa aircraft recorded data on prevailing temperatures and winds, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said.

Because the exact accident site was unknown, it was "extremely difficult to say how close they were", WMO official Herbert Puempel told Reuters news agency in Geneva.
"But the observations will certainly be used by the investigating group," he added.
In his last radio message, at about 0200 GMT on Monday, the captain of Flight AF 447 reported entering turbulence, French media say.
Up to a dozen reports of electrical failures were sent automatically from the plane before it vanished over the ocean just after.
Most of the missing people are Brazilian or French but they include a total of 32 nationalities. Five Britons and three Irish citizens are among them.
Crisis centres have been set up at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and Rio's Tom Jobim international airport.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy will attend a religious service for the families and friends of the missing passengers and crew at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, on Wednesday.
One of the Brazilians on board was Pedro Luis de Orleans e Braganca, a direct descendent of the last Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro II, a spokesman for the family said.

 

[Dumb Pilot]

CNN international just reported that the Brazilian air force found two debris fields with recognizable signs of aircraft components (a seat, some life preservers) but no signs of survivors

God Bless

 

[Erlanger]

Here's the weather data for the time of the Air France flight.

http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/