PARIS – One Canadian was among the passengers on Air France Flight 447 that is believed to have crashed in the Atlantic Ocean after departing Rio de Janeiro.
Global News has confirmed that the passenger is Brad Clemes from Guelph, Ontario.
The aircraft has sent no signal from its distress beacons, meaning there was a "very rapid" catastrophe, a top French space agency official said Monday.
Philippe Hazane, deputy director of the National Centre for Space Studies, a French government agency for space policy, told Agence France-Presse that none of the three beacons on board Air France Flight 447, carrying 228 passengers and crew, gave any signal that the plane was in trouble.
Air France confirmed a Canadian was on board.
"If no signal has been registered, that indicates that they were destroyed before they could emit one and, therefore, that the catastrophe was very rapid," Hazane said. "Distress beacons are fixed to all passenger planes and emit an automatic signal when the plane is in distress, taking a dangerous route or suffering a crash. Signals cannot be picked (up) if the beacons are underwater," he added.
"The prospects of finding any survivors are very slim," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at Charles de Gaulle International Airport outside Paris after meeting with shocked family members. "It’s a catastrophe the likes of which Air France has never seen."
Air France’s chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, who was also at Charles de Gaulle, confirmed the air disaster. "We are without a doubt faced with an aviation catastrophe. The entire company is thinking of the families and shares their pain."
Both at the Paris airport and in Rio de Janeiro, where the flight started, family and friends of passengers and crew gathered waiting for news.
"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," said Bernado, declining to give his last name.
Around 50 relatives had gathered in the hours after the news that Flight 447 had disappeared from radar screens. Few spoke to a group of waiting reporters, and they were ushered away by airport staff to a closed lounge where psychological and medical assistance was being provided.
One woman, Vasti Ester van Sluijs, told AFP she jumped into a taxi as soon as she heard her daughter’s flight – an overnight Air France service from Rio de Janeiro to Paris – 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 added.
If, as expected, it is confirmed that all 228 people were killed, it would mark the worst loss of life in Air France’s history and civil aviation’s worst accidental disaster for more than a decade.
"Air France addresses its sincere condolences to the families and friends of the passengers and crew members who were on board flight number AF 447," the airline said in a statement on its website.
French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, also responsible for transport, has ruled out terrorism, and noted that the plane would have run out of fuel had it still been in the air.
"There’s nothing on Spanish radar, nothing on Moroccan radar, nothing on French radar. We can seriously envisage the worst," he said.
Borloo told AFP there were "powerful" tropical storms in the zone.
"It is the kind of jet made to handle this kind of circumstance, but there must have been a buildup of circumstances."
Borloo was among top French officials sent to the Paris airport, where worried relatives of the passengers and crew gathered.
Just over half of the people on the flight are Brazilian, while at least 40 are French and 25 are German, a French government minister said Monday.
Separately, officials from other countries said it was believed that there were eight Chinese, three Danes, three to five Italians, three Norwegians, three Moroccans, two Lebanese, two Poles, two Slovaks and a Portuguese among the passengers, along with the Canadian.
Flight 447 left Rio de Janeiro on Sunday at 6 p.m. ET and had been expected to land at Charles de Gaulle on Monday at 5:15 a.m. ET. The carrier said seven children and one baby were among those on the flight and that the pilots were highly experienced.
The Brazilian air force said its planes had scrambled to search for the jet off its northeast coast. A French military reconnaissance plane also flew out of Senegal to take part in the search. France has asked the U.S. military to use its network of spy satellites and listening stations to help find the jet, defence ministry officials said.
The flight reportedly disappeared from radar tracking between Natal, Brazil and the Cape Verde island of Ilha do Sal, according to a Brazilian air force colonel speaking on Brazil’s CBN radio.
Flight 447 sent an automatic error message reporting a fault in an electrical circuit roughly 15 minutes after the plane flew through a stormy area with strong turbulence and just over four hours after it left Rio, according to Air France.
"The most likely thing is that the plane was hit by lightning. The plane was in a stormy area with strong turbulence, which provoked problems," said Francois Brousse, the airline’s director of communications.
"The aircraft went through a thunderstorm with severe turbulence" several hours after takeoff, Air France said in a news release, leading to an "electrical failure."
Airbus said the aircraft, an Airbus A330, has a good safety record – there have never been fatalities on a commercial flight – but in 1994 one crashed during a test flight in southern France, killing seven people on board.
Air France said it has asked France’s civil aviation agency to investigate the incident. The carrier said it has sent all the information it has on the flight, and the incident, to the French civil aviation authority, and to Airbus to help in the investigation.
The aircraft had been in service since April 2005, and underwent routine maintenance on April 16, 2009.
The last major incident involving an Air France plane was in July 2000 when one of its Concorde supersonic airliners crashed just after taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport bound for New York.
All 109 people on board were killed along with at least four on the ground.
In August 2005, an Air France Airbus burst into flames after shooting off the runway at Toronto airport following a storm. No one died in the crash.
That same month, 160 people were killed, including 152 French citizens, in the crash of a McDonnell Douglas plane belonging to the Colombian company West Caribbean Airways at Maracaibo in Venezuela.
With files from AFP and Reuters
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