maybe aliens exist :uhoh:

^ You ain't sleeping yet, Min? :o

 

Yeah. I hope the plane had landed safely on somewhere undetectable rather than crashed into the sea... :\

You aren't asleep yet either rudz :uhoh:

Oh my god, I hope they're okay. :o

One couple should've taken this plane, but they missed it ! :stunned:

They were really pissed first, but I guess they must feel very weird now :\

they must feel the most lucky people ever to miss it :stunned:

Yeah... except that they said it was Providence :dozey:

What about the other people ?

well the others :sick:

i'm very sorry for them :(

news about the plane

 

they apparently found some debris around the atlantic ocean but they're not sure yet if these debris came from the plane, anyway this is what the Bresilian Airline noticed while they were flying above the ocean :\

Burning wreckage spotted in sea on route of Air France plane downed by lightning strike

 

By David Williams

Last updated at 8:43 AM on 02nd June 2009

 

 

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Burning wreckage from what could be the missing Air France A330 that vanished over the Atlantic yesterday has been spotted by another airline pilot.

 

Pilots flying a commercial jet from Paris to Rio de Janeiro for Brazil's largest airline, TAM, said they saw what they thought was fire in the ocean along the route taken by the missing plane carrying 228 passengers early yesterday.

Brazilian Air Force spokesman Col Jorge Amaral said authorities were investigating the report.

 

'There is information that the pilot of a TAM aircraft saw several orange points on the ocean while flying over the region ... where the Air France plane disappeared,' Col Amaral said.

 

 

 

Missing: Arthur Coakley, left, was one of five Britons and Eithne Walls, right, was among three Irish on the Air France plane

 

'After arriving in Brazil, the pilot found out about the disappearance (of the Air France plane) and said that he thought those points on the ocean were fire.'

The spot where the jet crashed has since been pinpointed ‘within a few dozen square nautical miles’ – paving the way for a multi-million pound salvage operation.

 

A massive ‘sweep’ search operation involving planes, ships and U.S. spy satellites helped to locate it.

 

Submarines and other state-of-the-art nautical equipment will have to be used to retrieve the flight recorder – or black box - which holds the key to what went wrong on the doomed Airbus.

 

 

Relatives of passengers comfort each other at Tom Jobim airport in Rio de Janeiro after they were told prospects of finding survivors are very small

 

 

 

But the distance to the spot is massive, and it could still be many hours before the first rescue vessel arrives.

It came as French intelligence agents from the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) prepared to travel to Brazil to investigate a possible terrorist attack.

Nobody has yet explained why pilots on the Rio to Paris flight failed to make a Mayday Call – something which would have taken a couple of seconds.

Investigators are baffled as to why the plane disappeared off radar screens so suddenly.

Announcing the latest breakthrough in the enquiry, Air France director general Pierre-Henry Gourgeon said: ‘The catastrophe which devastated us all happened half way between the Brazilian and African coasts and the area concerned has been circled.’

 

 

This diagram shows the approximate path of flight AF447

 

 

This is believed to be the plane that disappeared over the Atlantic in the early hours of this morning, identified by its registration number, F-GZCP (file photo)

 

He said rescue boats were already on their way to the area, although the wreckage will be deep below the Atlantic ocean.

Last night, the wife of one of five Britons believed to have died in the incident spoke of her family's anguish.

Patricia Coakley said she was convinced her husband Arthur, 61, had boarded the jet before it left Rio.

 

She said she and their three grown-up children were ' distraught'.

 

'My children are devastated. They absolutely worshipped their father. We've now got a huge gaping hole in our family,' she said.

 

Mrs Coakley, 58, from Whitby, Yorkshire, said that they had been struggling to get information on the doomed flight and the missing passengers.

 

'The emergency number we saw on the news for people calling from outside the country was not even working. We have been on the phones since 11 o'clock this morning an no one has been in touch with us.

 

'All we know is what we have seen on the news and read online.'

 

Mr Coakley, a design engineer, had been working in Brazil and was originally meant to fly home on May 19th, and then 27th. He was only put on this flight at the last minute.

 

Enlarge A hand out graphic provided by the Brazilian Air Force shows the area over the Atlantic Ocean where air traffic controllers lost track of the plane

 

 

His business partner Ken Pearce said the previous flight which he had hoped to board was full.

 

Mrs Coakley said she still thought of her husband as missing.

 

'He's not dead, he's missing. We have to hope that he will walk through the front door. I've been trying his phone and it's still ringing, so I have hope.'

She added: 'Art loves his family so much. If he has an ounce of breath left in his body he will come home.

 

'Art will come home, he will.'

 

The couple's three children are Dominic, 32, Patrick, 30, and one daughter Mise, 25.

 

She added: 'I keep leaving messages for him, if his mobile was under the water it wouldn't keep taking the messages.'

 

The flight from Brazil to Paris is thought to have been hit by lightning from a tropical storm and suffered a catastrophic electrical failure.

 

'A succession of a dozen technical messages' showed that 'several electrical systems had broken down' which caused a 'totally unprecedented situation in the plane', said Pierre-Henry Gourgeon, chief executive of Air France .

'It is probable that it was shortly after these messages that the impact in the Atlantic came,' he told reporters at Charles de Gaulle airport, where the airliner had been due to land.

 

A massive search operation involving planes, ships and U.S. spy satellites had found no trace of the Airbus A330-200.

Flight AF 447 was four hours into its journey when it left the limits of Brazilian radar coverage, 350 miles out into the Atlantic. It was flying normally at 35,000 feet and 522 mph.

About half an hour later, it flew into what meteorologists called 'a thunderous zone with strong turbulence'. Fourteen minutes later, it sent an automatic message reporting the failure of an electrical circuit and a loss of cabin pressure.

When the Airbus, still out of range of any land-based radar, failed to make its next scheduled position report, the search operation was launched.

Planes took off from Fernando de Noronha, a string of more than 20 islands about 220 miles off the coast of Brazil.

 

 

Frightened relatives arrive at the airport in Brazil to learn the fate of their loved ones on board Flight AF447

 

 

More relatives arrive at the airport in Rio de Janeiro

 

In France, tearful relatives and friends were led away by airport staff as they arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who visited a crisis centre there, said the prospects of finding any survivors were 'very small.'

He said: 'I met a mother who lost her son, a fiancee who lost her future husband. I told them the truth.'

In Brazil, more relatives gathered at Galeao airport in Rio de Janeiro after hearing the plane was missing.

If no survivors are found it will be the worst crash since 2001 and the biggest loss of life in Air France's 75-year history.

 

 

The Arrivals board at Charles de Gaulle airport still showed Flight 447's status as 'Delayed' (second from top) at nearly 1pm in Paris. Shortly after the flight was removed from the board

 

As well as the Britons and three Irish citizens there were 61 French people and 58 Brazilians on board, with at least 20 Germans and several Italians.

A baby and seven children were among the passengers.

The plane had a 12-strong French crew, including three pilots led by a captain who had 11,000 hours flying experience, including 1,700 hours on the Airbus.

 

One of the Brazilians on board was Pedro Luis de Orleans e Braganca, a direct descendant of Dom Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, a spokesman for the royal family told Reuters.

Executives from French tire company Michelin, the Brazilian unit of German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp, and Brazilian mining giant Vale were also among the passengers, said company officials and family members.

 

Weather experts said tropical thunderstorms are far more violent than those in the UK and tower so high it can be impossible to fly over them.

'At the altitude it was flying, it's possible that the Air France plane flew directly into the most charged part of the storm,' said Henry Margusity, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com.

More scenes of despair in Paris, where friends and relatives of those on board the flight were also ushered to a crisis centre to hear the tragic news

 

 

A couple are in tears as they wait at Tom Jobim airport in Rio de Janeiro for information

 

The mid-Atlantic region is where most hurricanes originate, and this is the beginning of the storm season.

Aviation experts said it was highly unusual for modern planes to be brought down by lightning, although heavy turbulence can cause structural problems.

Passenger planes are equipped with radar to enable them to see and avoid storms.

David Learmount, safety and operations editor of Flight International magazine, said: 'Aircraft are designed to be able to survive lightning strikes.

'They have to be, because they occur often, usually causing minor damage but, very rarely, serious damage to electrical or control systems.

'Modern aircraft are so reliable and have so many backups for every system that a single electrical fault, or even the loss of an entire circuit, would be easily dealt with - if that were all that occurred.'

A couple clings to one another as they make their way to the crisis centre at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to learn the fate of Flight AF447

 

Mr Learmount said a crash in September 1998, which killed all 229 people on a Swissair MD-11 plane, was evidence of what can happen with a particular type of electrical fault.

The plane, flying from New York to Geneva, crashed off Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada, almost an hour after take-off.

 

'We are probably facing an air catastrophe': Air France company chairman Pierre Henri Gourgeon speaks

 

 

Mr Learmount said: 'A fire spread above the ceiling in the front area of the aircraft, and all its systems failed. Radio communications and radar contact with the plane were lost and the "black box" flight recorders stopped functioning.

'If the last message from the Air France plane has been correctly interpreted as a short circuit, that raises the spectre of an electrically caused fire, and fire is always serious in an aircraft.'

He added: 'This is the kind of event the aviation world hoped it would not see again, because it involves a world-class carrier flying the latest generation of airliner, and it occurred en route, not during take-off or landing in difficult weather. It's a chilling reminder that nothing is impossible, however unthinkable.'

The missing Britons had not been named last night, although their families have been informed.

The Irish government said the three Irish women, all in their mid-twenties, had been travelling with a British woman from Wales.

They were returning home after a holiday in Brazil with other friends who graduated with them from Trinity College Dublin two years ago.

They were named locally as Aisling Butler, of Roscrea, Co Tipperary, Jane Deasy of Dublin and Eithne Walls, originally from Belfast.

 

If all 228 people have died it will be the worst commercial airline disaster since November 2001, when an American Airlines jetliner crashed in the New York borough of Queens, killing 265 people.

In February 2003, 275 people were killed when a military plane carrying troops crashed as it prepared to land at Kerman airport in Iran.

The archipelago of Fernando da Noronha, near where the Brazilian Air Force believes Flight AF447 may have crashed into the ocean

 

The worst single-plane disaster was in 1985 when a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountainside after losing part of its tail fin, killing 520 people.

It is the first fatal crash of an A330-200 in operational service, although seven people were killed when a test flight went wrong in Toulouse in 1994.

The A330-200 is a twin- engine, long-haul, medium-capacity jet. It is a shortened version of the standard A330, and can hold up to 253 passengers with a range of 7,760 miles. There are 341 of them in use worldwide.

Crashes caused by lightning are incredibly rare. With some 25,000 commercial jets flying around the world, there are an estimated 30 lightning strikes every day. Most end with no damage or only small dents.

 

But in December 1963 lightning ignited vapours in the fuel tanks of a Pan American World Airways Boeing 707 over Maryland. All 81 people on board died.

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I feel terrible :(

 

So so so sorry this has happened.

One couple should've taken this plane, but they missed it ! :stunned:

They were really pissed first, but I guess they must feel very weird now :\

let's hope that they don't develop the survivor sindrome. (sorry for the typing).

i mean it has been told that when people survive an event like that, they end feeling guilty for it. :stunned:

 

so bad news :(

i remember last year when a plane crashed here in Madrid, it was so traumatic. :bigcry:

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terrible... :(

This is so sad! :bigcry:

I just imagined how did the passengers feel and do during the time the plane crash...

 

:cry:

Wreckage seen in search area for missing plane

 

(CNN) -- Wreckage has been found in the Atlantic Ocean that could have come from a missing Air France jet that disappeared Monday with 228 passengers and crew on board, Brazilian aviation officials said Tuesday.

 

Brazilian, French and Senegalese rescue teams were combing vast sections of the Atlantic.

 

A report of "shiny spots" in the sea along the route of Flight 447 by a crew from the Brazilian airline TAM prompted a search in the territorial waters off Senegal, but without result.

 

The Airbus A330, carrying 228 people, encountered heavy turbulence early Monday, some three hours after it began the 11-hour flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, according to Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon.

 

At that point, the plane's automatic system initiated a four-minute series of messages to the company's maintenance computers, indicating that "several pieces of aircraft equipment were at fault or had broken down," he told reporters.

 

During that time, there was no contact with the crew, Gourgeon said.

 

"It was probable that it was a little bit after those messages that the impact of the plane took place in the Atlantic," he added.

 

The Airbus A330 was off radar and probably closer to Brazil than to Africa at the time, he said.

 

Two squadrons from Brazil's air force launched a search near the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha in the Atlantic Ocean, about 365 kilometers (225 miles) from Brazil's coast, an air force spokesman told CNN. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France sent ships and planes to an area about 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Brazil.

 

"Our Spanish friends are helping us, Brazilians are helping us a lot as well," he said.

 

The average depth of the Atlantic is close to 12,000 feet -- more than 2 miles.

 

The plane carried 216 passengers -- 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby -- and 12 crew members, Air France said. Of the crew, 11 were French and one was Brazilian.

 

An official list of victims' names was not available late Monday, but the only two Americans on board -- Michael Harris, 60, and his wife, Anne, 54 -- were identified by the couple's family and his employer.

 

"Anne and Mike were indeed a beautiful couple inside and out, and I miss them terribly already," said Anne Harris' sister, Mary Miley.

 

Michael Harris was a geologist in Rio de Janeiro for Devon Energy, the largest U.S.-based independent natural gas and oil producer, according to a company spokesman.

 

The couple had lived in the city since July 2008 and was traveling to Paris for a training seminar for Michael and for a vacation, Miley told CNN.

 

Another passenger was Prince Pedro Luis de Orleans e Braganca, a member of Brazil's non-reigning royal family, his family confirmed Monday. Pedro Luis was 26.

 

In addition, a spokeswoman for the French tire company Michelin told CNN that two company executives were on board the aircraft. She identified them as the president of Michelin Latin America, Luiz Roberto Anastacio, and the director of informatics, Antonio Gueiros. She added that Michelin was very saddened by their presumed deaths.

 

The airline identified the nationalities of the other victims as: Argentine (1); Austrian (1); Belgian (1); Brazilian (58); British (5); Canadian (1); Chinese (9); Croatian (1); Danish (1); Dutch (1); Estonian (1); Filipino (1); French (61); Gambian (1); German (26); Hungarian (4); Icelandic (1); Irish (3); Italian (9); Lebanese (5); Moroccan (2); Norwegian (3); Polish (2); Romanian (1); Russian (1); Slovakian (3); Spanish (2); Swedish (1); Swiss (6); Turkish (1).

 

The jet was 4 years old and had last undergone routine maintenance on April 16.

 

Its crew included three pilots, including a 58-year-old captain who had logged 11,000 hours in flight, and nine cabin crew members, Air France said in a statement. Some 1,700 of the captain's hours were on two Airbus models. Of the two co-pilots -- ages 37 and 32 -- one had 3,000 hours of flying experience and the other 6,600 hours. The aircraft had flown 18,870 hours, the statement said.

 

Of the passengers, 149 had planned to connect to flights going elsewhere in Europe or as far away as China, Gourgeon said.

 

"This is a catastrophe the likes of which Air France has never seen before," Sarkozy told reporters at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where he had met with relatives of those missing aboard the flight.

 

"I said the truth to them: The prospects of finding survivors are very low," he said.

 

France asked the U.S. military to assist in the search with U.S. detection satellites, French Transport Minister Jean-Louis Borloo told CNN affiliate France 2. Pentagon officials did not immediately confirm the request.

 

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told reporters in San Salvador, El Salvador, that he had spoken with Sarkozy, but neither leader knew what to say.

 

"All we could do was thank each other," Lula said. "He thanked me for the speed with which the Brazilian air force took charge."

 

He added, "In times like these, there is little to do but to deeply lament, to wish the families a lot of strength, because there are no words."

 

The jet, which was flying at 35,000 feet and at 521 mph, also sent a warning that it had lost pressure, the Brazilian air force said.

 

The jet took off from Rio de Janeiro's Galeao International Airport at 11:30 p.m. Sunday. Its last known contact occurred at 02:33 a.m. Monday, the Brazilian air force spokesman said. It was not clear what that final contact was.

 

It was expected to check in with air traffic controllers at 03:20 a.m. but did not do so. Brazilian authorities asked the air force to launch a search mission just over three hours later.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/06/02/brazil.france.plane.missing/index.html

Aw man:(

I guess they might be landing in Gambia :thinking:

 

Gambia is located between North Senegal and South Senegal right?

 

:uhoh:

OMG, I'm so sad right now... I just found out my friend's best friends from Germany were on the plane :cry:

 

He was just on the news here in Houston talking about it... I'm so shocked :stunned: I really don't know what to say. The whole thing is just so odd and surreal and now knowing people who were on it is just so much more devasting. The most awful thing about it, is that they had just gotten engaged after meeting in law school in Germany and were in Rio visiting her parents. They were only 26 and 27 and his birthday would have been on Friday :cry:

 

EDIT: http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=6845251

Oh no! I'm so sorry :(

This is so sad. :( I feel terrible for all of the families/relatives of the crash victims. :bigcry:

What a terrible way to die. I can only imagine the fear they must have felt knowing they were about to die. I hope they died instantly and weren't in pain.

OMG, I'm so sad right now... I just found out my friend's best friends from Germany were on the plane :cry:

 

He was just on the news here in Houston talking about it... I'm so shocked :stunned: I really don't know what to say. The whole thing is just so odd and surreal and now knowing people who were on it is just so much more devasting. The most awful thing about it, is that they had just gotten engaged after meeting in law school in Germany and were in Rio visiting her parents. They were only 26 and 27 and his birthday would have been on Friday :cry:

 

EDIT: http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=6845251

 

Aw no.... I'm so sorry for you :embarassed:

This story is terrible ...

OMG, I'm so sad right now... I just found out my friend's best friends from Germany were on the plane :cry:

 

He was just on the news here in Houston talking about it... I'm so shocked :stunned: I really don't know what to say. The whole thing is just so odd and surreal and now knowing people who were on it is just so much more devasting. The most awful thing about it, is that they had just gotten engaged after meeting in law school in Germany and were in Rio visiting her parents. They were only 26 and 27 and his birthday would have been on Friday :cry:

 

EDIT: http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=6845251

I feel very sad now:cry:

OMG, I'm so sad right now... I just found out my friend's best friends from Germany were on the plane :cry:

 

He was just on the news here in Houston talking about it... I'm so shocked :stunned: I really don't know what to say. The whole thing is just so odd and surreal and now knowing people who were on it is just so much more devasting. The most awful thing about it, is that they had just gotten engaged after meeting in law school in Germany and were in Rio visiting her parents. They were only 26 and 27 and his birthday would have been on Friday :cry:

 

EDIT: http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=6845251

 

I have no words :\ :cry: ...I know the pain you have and I'm soooo sorry for you and all the families :cry: ... I'm thinking about all the people !

 

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