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Air France jet with 231 people on board 'drops off radar'

An Air France passenger jet with 231 people on board is missing after dropping off radar screens over the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Brazil.

Air traffic controllers lost contact with the Airbus A330-200 at 0600 GMT, eight hours after it took off from Rio de Janeiro bound for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

A spokeswoman for the airline said today: "Air France announces with regret that it is without news of flight AF447 from Rio to Paris, which has 216 passengers aboard, and shares the fears of the families involved."

Air France said that there were a total of 15 crew aboard the plane, including three technicians.

An official at the Paris airport authority said: "We are very worried. The plane disappeared from the screens several hours ago. It could be a transponder problem, but this kind of fault is very rare and the plane did not land when expected."

The aircraft was due to arrive in Paris at 11.10 am (0910GMT), which means that it would have been approaching the coast of North Africa or Spain when it lost contact.

Airport authorities have set up a crisis cell at Charles de Gaulle and Air France said all those waiting for the flight would be given access to a special waiting area at the airport's second terminal.

The aircraft in question, tail number F-GZCP, came into service in February 2005.

President Sarkozy's office said that he had asked authorities to "do all they could" to help find the missing aricraft. In a statement, the Elysée said that the President had been informed of the loss of contact this morning and had expressed "the greatest anxiety"

Source: Timesonline.co.uk

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"The same type of aircraft is used by Qantas..."

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I'm surprised no one has yet drawn the link between the aircraft type and what happened near Learmonth last year to a couple of other A330s.

It'll only be a matter of time before the media picks up on it.

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AT least 228 people are believed dead after a catastrophic failure on board an Air France plane over the Atlantic Ocean.

Anxious families gathering at airports in Paris and Brazil have been told any hope of survival is slim.

The Airbus A330 overnight service from Rio de Janeiro to Paris suffered multiple technical failures before crashing into the Atlantic, the airline's chief executive said today.

"A succession of a dozen technical messages" sent by the aircraft around 2.15am GMT (10:15pm AEST) showed that "several electrical systems had broken down" which caused a "totally unprecedented situation in the plane," said Pierre-Henry Gourgeon said.

"It is probable that it was shortly after these messages that the impact in the Atlantic came."

Mr Gourgeon said that military planes had narrowed down their search area to a zone of a few dozen nautical miles half-way between Brazil and west Africa. Three Brazilian navy ships are on their way to assist in the search.

Will Sunderlanders of Melb Burn Relatives of those on board the flight raced to Rio de Janeiro's airport, numb with shock and disbelief at the certain tragedy that had befallen their loved ones.

Bernado, one of the first to arrive at the city's airport, had despair edging into his voice as he explained his brother and sister-in-law where on the missing Airbus.

"I called Air France right away, and they told me they didn't have information. That's why I decided to come to the airport," he said, declining to give his last name.

Vasti Ester van Sluijs, said she had jumped into a taxi as soon as she heard her daughter's flight - had disappeared from the radar over the Atlantic Ocean.

"My daughter Adriana Francesca was on the plane," she said, shocked.

Her daughter had been on her way to Paris for a connecting flight to Seoul, for business, she said.

In Paris distraught relatives were ushered into a cordoned-off area of the main terminal at Rio at Charles de Gaulle airport, expecting the worse after officials said flight AF447 appeared to have had an electrical failure.

Uniformed teams from Air France and the airport manning the desk refused to say how they had broken news to the relatives.

At a refreshment stand in the arrivals hall, waitresses said they had served a couple in tears.

Shortly afterwards, two young women, their eyes swollen with weeping, brushed away questions by reporters, one of them saying: "Now is not the time."

France's minister in charge of transport, Jean-Louis Borloo, said there was a "real pessimism at this hour'' about the fate of the aircraft.

"We can fear the worst," he said on Europe-1 radio.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his "extreme worry'' and went to Charles de Gaulle to meet relatives awaiting news of their loved ones.

"We have no exact idea what happened. It's a catastrophe the likes of which Air France has never seen," he said.

"We have come to meet the families who are extremely dignified and courageous. Everyone can well imagine what a mother who lost her daughter, a fiancee who lost her future husband, are thinking.

"I told them the truth, which is that the prospects of finding any survivors are very slim."

Airbus said the A330 has a good safety record, with no fatalities ever on a commercial flight. One did crash in 1994 during a test flight in southern France, however, killing seven people on board.

In October last year a computer glitch caused a Qantas A330 to climb before nose diving over Western Australia injuring dozens of passengers.

In November 2007 six people were injured in a "depressurisation incident" during the test flight of an Airbus A330 to be delivered to Air Mauritius.

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This was being aired on radio in MEL this morning as a possible cause of the (probable ) hull loss

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