A BRAZILIAN naval ship yesterday reached an area in the mid-Atlantic where floating debris and oil believed to be from missing Air France Flight 447 was spotted by airforce search planes. But by yesterday afternoon the navy said the patrol boat Grajaú had yet to encounter signs of the debris.
Authorities are hoping to find a serial number on any pieces of recovered wreckage with which to confirm that they come from the lost aircraft.
The flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris had 228 people on board, including three Irish doctors and two Aer Lingus employees, when it went missing on Sunday night, about four hours into its flight.
Several Brazilian search aircraft have spotted debris floating in the water. One of the pieces spotted was seven metres in diameter, according to airforce spokesman Col Jorge Amaral.
“It could be part of the side, a piece of wing, fuselage or rear section. A piece of seven metres is considerable,” said Col Amaral.
The French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses, the organisation that investigates air crashes, said yesterday that two black boxes – the voice and data recorders – from flight AF447 may never be found, but that this will not prevent experts from discovering the cause of the accident.
Paul Louis Arslanian, the director of the bureau, told a press conference that “it cannot be excluded that we may not find the flight recorders”, which are in a deep, mountainous zone beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
“Don’t believe that we’re faced with the following question: if we have the recorders, we will know what happened; if we don’t have them, we will not. That is false,” Mr Arslanian said. The degree of certainty would be less without the recorders, but investigators could, nonetheless, determine the cause of the disaster.
There is no evidence that the Airbus A330 had any problems before taking off from Rio de Janeiro, Mr Arslanian said.
Also yesterday, the French company Acsa, which specialises in undersea searches using Global Positioning Systems, was contacted by the bureau to help it attempt to retrieve the black boxes. Acsa has perfected a system that uses buoys to detect bodies and flight recorders at sea. But a director of the company said the circumstances of the Air France crash would “test the system to its limits”.
The Brazilian airforce released a photograph taken by a search aircraft which showed streaks of oil in calm waters and sunny skies.
Early on Tuesday a Brazilian Hercules C-130 flew over the area and its crew reported seeing a seat, bits of white metal, a white buoy and traces of oil and kerosene floating in the water near the uninhabited archipelago of São Pedro and São Paulo, which is located more than 1,000km from Brazil’s northeastern coast.
The location is in the region where the Airbus 330-200 was last known to have been and is also close to where the pilots of a Brazilian passenger jet flying from Paris to Rio de Janeiro reported seeing “orange spots” on the ocean surface around the time the Air France craft disappeared.
Authorities believe these spots might have been caused by fuel from the missing craft burning on the ocean surface after some sort of catastrophic event.
After visiting relatives of missing passengers in Rio de Janeiro’s international airport on Tuesday evening, Brazil’s defence minister Nelson Jobim said there was no doubt that the debris spotted was the remains of the missing flight.
However, he too cautioned that finding the black boxes would prove extremely difficult.
“The black box doesn’t float. We will have to look. At great depths it will be very difficult to find it,” he said. The ocean in the region where the aircraft went missing is more than 3km deep.
Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said a country that recently found oil 6km below the ocean surface “can find a plane two kilometres down”.
One French rescue ship heading to the location is carrying the mini-submarine Nautile which was used to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, lying 3,821m below the ocean surface. However, the ship will not arrive at the location until next week.
Authorities remain mystified as to the possible cause of the crash, given that mid-flight disasters are extremely rare.
Brazilian air traffic controllers first became concerned for the safety of the craft when it failed to make radio contact as scheduled with controllers on the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha late on Sunday night, about four hours into its flight.
It was crossing a zone of the Atlantic that is not covered by radar and where pilots radio air traffic control about every half hour to confirm their location and direction. In Flight 447’s last communication the pilot reported flying at 35,000 feet and at 840km an hour.