Debris confirms crash of Air France Flight 447

updated 7:41 p.m. ET June 2, 2009

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil - An airplane seat, a fuel slick and pieces of white debris scattered over three miles of open ocean marked the site in the mid-Atlantic Tuesday where Brazilian officials said Air France Flight 447 crashed.

Brazilian military pilots spotted the wreckage, sad reminders bobbing on waves, in the ocean 400 miles northeast of these islands off Brazil’s coast. The plane carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down in waters up to three miles deep Sunday night.

“I can confirm that the five kilometers of debris are those of the Air France plane,” Defense Minister Nelson Jobim told reporters at a hushed press conference in Rio. He said no bodies had been found and there was no sign of life.

The effort to recover the debris and locate the all-important black box recorders, which emit signals for only 30 days, is expected to be exceedingly challenging.

“We are in a race against the clock in extremely difficult weather conditions and in a zone where depths reach up to 7,000 meters (22,966 feet),” French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told lawmakers in parliament Tuesday .

Difficult to recover black box
Brazilian military pilots first spotted the floating debris early Tuesday in two areas about 35 miles (60 kilometers) apart, said Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral. The area is not far off the flight path of Flight 447.

The cause of the crash will not be known until the black boxes are recovered — which could take days or weeks. But weather and aviation experts are focusing on the possibility of a collision with a brutal storm that sent winds of 100 mph straight into the airliner’s path.

“The airplane was flying at 500 mph northeast and the air is coming at them at 100 mph,” said AccuWeather.com expert senior meteorologist Henry Margusity. “That probably started the process that ended up in some catastrophic failure of the airplane.”

Towering Atlantic storms are common this time of year near the equator — an area known as the intertropical convergence zone. “That’s where the northeast trade winds meet the southeast trade winds — its the meeting place of the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere’s weather,” said Margusity.

But several veteran pilots of big airliners said it was extremely unlikely that Flight 447’s crew intended to punch through a killer storm.

“Nobody in their right mind would ever go through a thunderstorm,” said Tim Meldahl, a captain for a major U.S. airline who has flown internationally for 26 years, including more than 3,000 hours on the same A330 jetliner.

Pilots often work their way through bands of storms, watching for lightning flashing through clouds ahead and maneuvering around them, he said.

“They may have been sitting there thinking we can weave our way through this stuff,” Meldahl said. “If they were trying to lace their way in and out of these things, they could have been caught by an updraft.”

The same violent weather that might have led to the crash also could impede recovery efforts.

“Anyone who is going there to try to salvage this airplane within the next couple of months will have to deal with these big thunderstorms coming through on an almost daily basis,” Margusity said. “You’re talking about a monumental salvage effort.”

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