FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil — An airplane seat, a fuel slick and pieces of white debris scattered over three miles marked the site in the mid-Atlantic on Tuesday where Air France Flight 447 plunged to its doom, Brazil’s defense minister said.
Brazilian military pilots spotted the wreckage in the ocean about 400 miles northeast of the Fernando de Noronha island off Brazil’s coast. The plane carrying 228 people vanished Sunday about four hours into its flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said no bodies had been found and there were no signs of life.
The effort to recover the debris and locate the all-important black box recorders, which emit signals for only 30 days, is expected to be exceedingly challenging: depths in the area can reach nearly 23,000 feet.
Weather and aviation experts are focusing on the possibility of a collision with a brutal storm that sent winds of 100 mph straight into the airliner’s path as the cause of the crash.
But several veteran pilots of big airliners said it was extremely unlikely that Flight 447’s crew intended to punch through a killer storm.
“Nobody in their right mind would ever go through a thunderstorm,” said Tim Meldahl, a captain for a major U.S. airline who has flown internationally for 26 years, including more than 3,000 hours on the same A330 jetliner.
Pilots often work their way through bands of storms, watching for lightning flashing through clouds ahead and maneuvering around them, he said.
“They may have been sitting there thinking we can weave our way through this stuff,” Meldahl said. “If they were trying to lace their way in and out of these things, they could have been caught by an updraft.”
Investigators have few clues to help explain what brought the Airbus A330 down. The crew made no distress call before the crash, but the plane’s system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost cabin pressure and electrical failure.
Brazilian officials described a three-mile strip of wreckage, and Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, D.C., and former accident investigator for airlines and aircraft manufacturers, said it could indicate the Air France jetliner came apart before it hit the water.
Remotely controlled submersible crafts will have to be used to recover wreckage settling so far beneath the ocean’s surface.
A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane, which can fly low over the ocean for 12 hours at a time and has radar and sonar designed to track submarines underwater, joined the search.
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