AIR FRANCE PLANE IS MISSING; MAY BE DEADLIEST AVIATION DISASTER SINCE 2001
A missing Air France jet, Flight 447, carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris ran into a towering wall of thunderstorms over the Atlantic Ocean. The vast area where the plane could have gone down was in the deep Atlantic Ocean waters between Brazil and the coast of Africa.
Brazil's military searched for it off its northeast coast, while the French military scoured the ocean near the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast.
The 4-year-old Airbus A330 left Rio on Sunday at 7:03 p.m. local time with 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board.
The plane left Brazil radar contact, beyond the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, at 10:48 local time, indicating it was flying normally at 35,000 feet and traveling at 522 mph.
About a half-hour later, the plane "crossed through a thunderous zone with strong turbulence." It sent an automatic message fourteen minutes later reporting electrical failure and a loss of cabin pressure.
Air France told Brazilian authorities the last information they heard was that automated message reporting a technical problem before the plane reached a monitoring station near the Cape Verde islands.
