Translated material
No hope
The worst plane crash in Air France history occurred over the Atlantic Ocean
Yesterday, as a result of the crash of an Airbus A330-200 of the French airline Air France, 227 people were killed: 215 passengers (126 men, 82 women, seven children) and 12 crew members. The airliner was operating flight AF 447 Rio de Janeiro - Paris and disappeared from radar screens after 3.5 hours of flight. However, it was not possible to find him by the time the newspaper was signed.Despite the lack of traces of the plane, aviation experts, as well as the authorities of Brazil and France, agreed that it was a plane crash. “There is no hope of finding survivors of any of the passengers and crew of the missing airliner,” sources at the Paris Airport Authority said. Experts also categorically rejected the version of the plane being hijacked.
The A330 commander was an experienced pilot - he had flown 11 thousand hours. The missing plane began operation in 2005 and flew about 19 thousand hours.
Before the plane disappeared from radar screens, the crew informed Brazilian controllers of a short circuit due to severe turbulence. According to Air France, 100 km before entering the Dakar (Senegal) air traffic control zone, the plane encountered technical problems - “loss of cabin pressure and electrical failure.” Around the same time, the airbus entered a strong thunderstorm front. Experts believe that this is what destroyed the liner. In their opinion, the cause of the disaster, in all likelihood, was a strong “thunderstorm,” that is, a lightning strike.
Now, in order to discover the remains of the plane, specialists need to calculate the exact location where the alleged plane crash occurred. The plane made its last communication with air traffic controllers while flying near Senegal. The Brazilian Air Force said in a communiqué that the crew contacted air traffic controllers as the plane was about to enter Senegalese airspace. However, due to very inaccurate and scattered information about the alleged crash site of the airliner, the search area yesterday was very wide: from the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, 270 km northeast of the coast of Brazil, to the Cape Verde Islands, 500 km to the west off the coast of Senegal.
Yesterday it was not possible to reliably establish whether there were Russians on board the crashed airbus . “The airline does not have lists indicating citizenship. And now they (airline employees. - Ed. ) are trying to check the lists that the airline has with the lists that the federal police, which carry out border control, have in order to find out who is a citizen of which countries from the passengers of this flight," said Russian Consul General in Rio de Janeiro Alexey Labetsky.
According to him, all that can be said with certainty is that there were no employees of Russian foreign agencies or diplomatic missions among the passengers on the plane. “We checked the embassy in the city of Brasilia, our consulates and foreign missions, and according to our information, their employees and family members were not on the plane,” the diplomat said.
According to data provided late yesterday evening by the Belgian radio station Contact, among the passengers of the plane that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean were citizens of more than 20 countries, including one Russian. On board the airliner, according to data provided by the radio station, there were also 80 Brazilians, 73 French, 18 Germans, 9 Italians, 6 Americans, 5 Chinese, 4 Hungarians, 2 Spaniards, 2 British, 2 Moroccans, 2 Irish and one citizen each from Angola and Argentina. , Iceland, Norway, Poland, Romania, Belgium, Slovakia, Sweden, Turkey, Philippines and Switzerland.
Relatives of passengers on the missing A330-200 arrived at Rio de Janeiro Tom Jobim International Airport yesterday awaiting new information about the fate of their loved ones. Air France, together with Brazil's National Civil Aviation Agency (Anac), has opened help centers at the airport and in one of the hotels in Rio, as well as hotlines where relatives of passengers can get information about the flight. An anti-crisis headquarters has also been created at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, where the missing flight was supposed to land. French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived there, as well as Ministers of Transport and Development Dominique Bassereau and Jean-Louis Borloo.
The crash of the A330 airliner, which carried 227 people, could become the largest in the history of the French company Air France. The previous major crash of an Air France flight occurred on July 25, 2000, when a Concorde plane caught fire during takeoff from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport and then crashed to the ground. Then 113 people died.