François Fillon (French PM) just finished a press conference...
He said: "The only thing we know for certain is that no distress call was sent by the aircraft, but the normal automatic alerts, for a three-minute period, indicated the shutdown of all the systems."
Admittedly, politicians are not technicians, but I don't know how he can know either of these things. Certainly, no distress call was received, but does that mean none was sent? And I'm not sure he knows what he's saying when he speaks of a complete "systems shutdown."