More than 200 people are believed dead after an Air France passenger jet disappeared over the Atlantic on a flight from Brazil.
Officials said they had “no hope” for Air France Flight 447 which dropped off the radar three hours and less than 200 miles into a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
As the Brazilian air force mounted a search and rescue operation for the Airbus 330-200k in the waters around the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, families of passengers gathered at a crisis centre in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport awaiting news.
The Foreign Office said it was “urgently” seeking news on whether there were any Britons on board.
Air France said that the aircraft had sent a message reporting an electrical “short circuit” after strong turbulence.
The company said the plane had probably been struck by lightning.
An Airbus source described the failure as “catastrophic” suggesting a sudden and unexplained systems failure.
The flight left Rio at 7pm local time (11pm British time) and was due in Paris at 11.15am (10.15am BST).
It was 190 miles north east of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal when it was lost contact three hours and 20 minutes later.
Authorities began the operation around Fernando de Noronha, an idyllic holiday destination but they cautioned that the search area could be three times the size of Europe.
Air France said that it “shares the emotion and worry of the families concerned.”
A source at the airline told Le Monde: “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.”
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said he had been informed of the crisis and ordered all relevant government agencies to hunt “for any sign of the plane”.
The country’s transport minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said there was “real pessimism at this hour”.
“We can fear the worst,” he said.
Media in Italy reported that five Italian nationals were among the 216 passengers and 12 crew on board.
Brazil’s air traffic control system has been in crisis since 2006, when a Gol passenger jet collided with a private plane above the Amazon killing all 154 people on board.
That disaster was followed just 10 months later by the worst crash in Brazil’s history when a TAM jet slid off the runway at São Paulo’s city airport and crashed into a warehouse. Some 199 people died.
Although the two crashes were not directly related, Brazil’s air traffic control system and oversight of it were implicated in both. The Gol crash caused nationwide turmoil after air traffic controllers launched strikes and go slows at what they said were poor working conditions.
The system is run by the military but questions were raised about the capacity, training and above all, the English language abilities, of the controllers.
The Gol crash reflected “systematic shortcomings in emphasis on positive air traffic control concepts,” the US’s National Transportation Safety Board said in its final report on the disaster.
Air France plane lost: officials say ‘no hope’ of finding airliner
