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The disappearance of an Air France jet en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Sunday evening left seasoned crash investigators with a mystery to plumb and very little data to work with.
The Airbus A330-200, carrying 228 passengers and crew members, is believed to have vanished in a towering thunderstorm with no word from its pilots that they were in crisis.
The plane had beamed out several signals that its electrical systems had malfunctioned and, according to one report, that it had lost cabin pressure. The signals were sent not as distress calls, however, but as automated reports to Air France's maintenance system, and were not read for hours, until air traffic controllers realized that the plane's crew had not radioed in on schedule.
As a search for wreckage began over the ocean between Brazil and the African coast, experts struggled to offer plausible theories as to how a well-maintained modern jetliner, built to withstand electrical and physical buffeting far greater than nature usually offers, could have gone down so silently and mysteriously.
There were no suggestions Monday that a bomb, hijacking or sabotage was to blame.
Pilots flying a commercial jet from Paris to Rio de Janeiro for Brazil's largest airline, TAM, spotted what they thought was fire in the ocean along the Air France jet's route early Monday, the airline said in to The Associated Press.
As is common with trans-ocean flights, it was too far out over the sea to be tracked on land-based radar from Brazil or Senegal. Whether its location was captured by satellite or other plane's radars is not known yet.
There were people of 32 nationalities aboard, including 58 Brazilians, 61 French and two Americans, Air France said in a statement based on information from Brazilian authorities.
Air France Flight 447 was scheduled to arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:10 a.m. local time. The flight took off from Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 p.m. Eastern time), and its last verbal communication with air traffic control was three hours later, at 10:33 p.m., according to a statement from Brazil's civil aviation agency. At that time, the flight was at 35,000 feet and traveling at 520 mph.
About a half-hour later, the flight apparently encountered an electrical storm with “very heavy turbulence,” Air France said. The last communication from it came at 11:14 – a series of automatic messages indicating it had suffered an electrical-system malfunction. The Associated Press reported that it also suffered a loss of cabin pressure.
Brazilian officials said the plane disappeared over the Atlantic somewhere between a point 186 miles northeast of their coastal city Natal and the Cape Verde islands off Africa. The area is known as the “horse latitudes,” where the tropics of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres mix, sometimes creating violent and unpredictable weather.
If an airplane went down in the mid-Atlantic, it could be very difficult to find any physical wreckage,” said John Hansman, an aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The mid-oceans are one of the remotest parts of the world. It's like going to the North Pole.”
Experts said the best clues to the cause of Flight 447's disappearance undoubtedly would come from the plane's “black box” data and voice recorders – if they can be recovered.
Typically, the black boxes have tracking beacons that activate when the boxes get wet, and the radio signal works for about 30 days. But search teams have to be within 4,000 to 5,000 feet of the recorders to pick up the signals, so among the key questions are how long the plane kept flying after its last automatic satellite transmission and why no mayday call was received from the pilots.
Hans Weber, an aviation technology consultant, said airplane satellite systems have their limits
“Just like your car, you may have all this information, but if you had a catastrophic accident, the GPS system will not survive,” Weber said. The Washington Post contributed.
