Rio De Janeiro, June 2: With time ticking fast, the French and Brazilian armies labored through the night to search for the remains of an Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday.">
The ill-fated Air France flight AF447 vanished during stormy weather over the Atlantic Ocean Sunday
Massive search operations on
Rescuers using planes with special search equipments searched deep waters in a cosmic region on both sides of the ocean but could not turn up with confirmed signs of the plane. The hunt to find the plane's two black boxes, which emit signals until up to 30 days, and survivors, if any, is on.
One of the pilots of Brazilian airline, TAM, flying a commercial flight from Paris to Rio had spotted a fire in the ocean along the Air France jet's route. However, the French merchant ship, the Douce France scanned the said area "without identifying any trace of the flight".
Colonel Jorge Amaral of the Brazilian Air Force said, “We will search all night long and keep going through dawn. We have to work as if it were possible to find survivors.”
The commercial vessels in the area have been pressed into service to give support to the search operation. The French authorities have also sought the satellite help from the United States to find the debris.
The tragedy
216 passengers and a crew of 12 were on board the Airbus A330 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The jet went down in a violent thunderstorm after encountering “very heavy turbulence”, Air France said.
Jean-Louis Borloo, the French transportation minister, said that the officials “do not believe that a simple bolt of lightning, something relatively classic in aviation, could have caused the loss of the craft. There really had to be a succession of extraordinary events to be able to explain this situation."
Four hours into the flight, the plane disappeared in an area of the mid-Atlantic ocean not covered by radar. If none of the 228 people on board survive, it would be the world's nastiest aviation tragedy since 2001.
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