Tragic certainty: Brazil confirms plane debris found

Brazilian navy craft were expected to sail the 1,000-kilometres to the location by Wednesday. The chance of finding survivors was seen as extremely slim.

 After personally informing relatives of passengers and crew, Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim said  that a "set of fragments" spread over a 5-kilometre radius had been found some 640 kilometres off the island Fernando de Noronha.

 "The debris is from the (Air France) aircraft. There's no doubt about it," Jobim said.

 Jobim noted that the objects were metal pieces and wires, apparently part of the structure of the missing plane, and a floating passenger seat.

  "Everything indicates that the plane fell in that region ... Our position is that it is part of the Airbus," Jobim explained.

  Following a tip from a Brazilian passenger airline TAM pilot on Monday about seeing "orange spots" on the ocean off the island, a Brazilian Air Force (FAB) plane on Tuesday spied the fragments from the air.

 Three merchant ships - a French and two Dutch vessels - were already near the crash site, and could be enlisted to help with retrieving the debris.

 The Airbus 330-200, carrying 216 passengers from 32 countries and 12 crew members, went suddenly missing early Monday morning after leaving Rio headed to Paris. The accident, if confirmed, would be the worst civil air travel catastrophe since 2001, when an American Airlines plane crashed as it took off in New York, killing 265 people.

 Jobim refused to speculate on the survival possibilities.

 "The search operations are based on facts and results, not hypotheses," Jobim said.

 An Air France spokeswoman said the company would release the passenger list on Wednesday.

 The area where the Airbus apparently vanished is feared by sailors and pilots because of its violent and unpredictable storms, and pilots flying the route between South American and Europe are trained specifically to handle the turbulence.

 Recovery work faces difficult challenges, with strong currents and uneven topography. The Atlantic plunges to 4,000 metre depth in the region, with spiking underwater mountain peaks scattered in the area.

 Immediately after the first sighting of a seat and traces of oil and kerosene, France dispatched a special vessel equipped with diving equipment that can work in depths of 6,000 metres.  French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said the equipment is calibrated to work in about 97 per cent of the world's sea floors.

 The reasons for the crash continue to elude experts. Officials lost contact with the plane as it headed to Paris about the same time - 0215 Monday - that the TAM crew spied the orange spots in the water.

 Grieving relatives  gathered at airports in Rio de Janeiro and Paris to await news of the plane's fate. US President Barack Obama promised that Washington would also aid in the search.

 As debris recovery efforts started Tuesday, speculation continued about the possible cause, including a terrorist bombing.

 French Defence Minister Herve Morin said there was no indication that the aircraft had fallen victim to terrorism.

 "We do not have the right to exclude a terrorist act," Morin told Europe 1 radio. "But we have no element today that would allow us to conclude ... that it was the cause of the accident."

   The plane's abrupt disappearance as well as the absence of distress signals led some experts to suggest that the plane could have exploded in mid-air.

 Initially, an Air France spokesman had suggested a lightning strike as a possible cause of the disaster, but that hypothesis was largely rejected by experts.

 "Lightning could cause damage to an aircraft, it could for example badly damage the plane's computers," Eric Derivry, of the National Airlines Pilots Union, told i-tele. "But we've never had a plane destroyed in the air by lightning. Lightning doesn't explain everything."

   Another theory is that the plane encountered a storm of such violence that it shook it apart.

 Borloo said that relatives of the passengers and crew that had been aboard the plane may travel to the search zone if they wished - a voyage that "could be a positive step for them," according to Thierry Baubet who heads the unit of psychologists caring for about 40 family members at Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport.

 Baubet was interviewed by i-tele television.