INVESTIGATION:THE FRENCH defence ministry said the aircraft seats, debris and kerosene patches discovered by the Brazilian airforce 650km northeast of Brazil yesterday afternoon were "a very serious lead," though France has not yet confirmed they are the wreckage of Air France flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean early on Monday.
President Nicolas Sarkozy promised families of the victims that they will be taken to the site of the disaster if they so desire. About 40 families remain under police guard in the Pullman Hotel near Roissy airport, where an entire floor is reserved for them.
French judiciary police are collecting DNA samples from relatives to help identify any remains that may be found. The magistrate who has been assigned to investigate the plane’s disappearance met the families at the Pullman Hotel yesterday, accompanied by the Paris prosecutor general. The latter said the exact list of passengers on the aircraft was “still being finalised”.
The families are to meet Mr Sarkozy again at the Élysée Palace on June 8th. The French leader will attend an ecumenical service in memory of the victims at Notre Dame Cathedral at 4pm today. Earlier in the afternoon, prayers will be held at the Grand Mosque in Paris.
Deputies and the prime minister Francois Fillon observed a minute of silence in the National Assembly yesterday.
“For the time being, no hypothesis is favoured,” Mr Fillon said.
“Our only certainty is that the plane sent no distress call, but regular automatic alerts for three minutes, showing that all the systems were going down.” The 228 lost lives were also remembered at the Roland Garros tennis championships and at the France-Nigeria football match in St Etienne.
Fr Francis Truptil, the chaplain of Roissy airport, is accompanying the families in the Pullman Hotel, along with doctors and psychologists.
"We tell them we're here to live this tragedy with them," Fr Francis told the Catholic newspaper La Croix."It goes a small way towards humanising the horror. I never say, 'God has taken so-and-so'. I don't believe that God wanted this, nor that he has anything to do with these disasters."
Among the 72 French citizens who died were 10 employees of CGED, a distributor of electrical equipment. Nine of these had taken spouses or companions on a four-day trip to Rio de Janeiro. “They were young men and women, aged 25 to 40, full of energy,” Laurent Bouveresse, the director general of the company told Europe 1 radio station. “They had just won a contest for best sales people.”
CGED set up a “crisis cell” to help the employees’ families. Air France, the French foreign ministry and the Seine Saint-Denis department (where Roissy airport is located) have also established “crisis cells”.
But Lilian Pawlak, whose daughter Sandrine died with her husband Stéphane, a CGED salesman, told the Agence France Presse: “No one offered us help. No one contacted us. We called all the [hotline] phone numbers that were constantly on the television screen, but they knew nothing.”
Ms Pawlak contacted a psychologist on Monday evening to ask how to break the news to the couple’s two children, aged nine and four. She did not receive confirmation that her daughter and son-in-law were on the flight until 6am yesterday.
French media coverage of the air disaster centres on possible explanations for the loss of the aircraft, namely lightning, turbulence, a breakdown or a terrorist act.
Experts say that dozens of aircraft are struck by lightning every year, with little or no damage because the aluminium fuselage acts as a “Faraday cage” or shield formed by conducting material. Even if lightning knocked out the plane’s electrical system, the A330-200 is equipped with a small reserve generator that should have kicked in to power instruments and communications.
The plane disappeared in what is known as the “pot au noir” or “dark cauldron,” the same area over the Atlantic Ocean where the great French aviator Jean Mermoz disappeared in 1936. This “intertropical convergence zone” over the equator is subject to winds of up to 200km/h, and cumulo-nimbus clouds up to 18,000 metres high, filled with mini-hurricanes and huge hailstones.
Air France has spoken of plural “breakdowns”. If, as reported, the aircraft suddenly depressurised, the lack of oxygen and sub-zero temperatures could have paralysed the pilot and crew, explaining the absence of calls for help.
If the investigation does not come to a clear conclusion, the suspicion that a bomb destroyed AF 447 will always linger. French anti-terrorism officials said they found no suspicious names on the passenger list. But , Le Figaroreported, security at the airport in Rio de Janeiro is more lax than in European airports. No one ever claimed responsibility for two of the worst airline bombings, Lockerbie in 1988 and the UTA DC-10 over Niger the following year.