(MSNBC reports on the Air France, Flight 447 tragedy. Some bodies have been found.)
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Telegraph.co.uk----
Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris began as an ordinary flight across the Atlantic, carrying passengers from 32 nations. But it ended in disaster.
Just 24 hours after celebrating their marriage with an extravagant Balinese-themed reception for 300 guests, Bianca Cotta and Carlos Eduardo de Melo set off for honeymoon in France at the start of a new life together.
The attractive couple from prominent Brazilian families, already rising stars in the legal and medical fields, had every reason to believe a wonderful future awaited them as they boarded Air France flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on the evening of Sunday, May 31.
Mr de Melo, 33, was a lawyer and Miss Cotta, the only child of one of the country's top engineering professors, was a dermatologist who last year graduated top of her class at medical school.
But by the time reports and pictures of their "fairytale" wedding made the society pages the following morning, the newly-weds were presumed dead, along with the other 214 passengers and 12 crew on board the doomed Airbus 330.
"The party was beautiful," said Cris Castelo, the wedding organiser and friend of the bride. "Despite the tragedy, at least they had one day with the people that they most loved in life. May they now rest in peace."
There was no hint of anything out of the ordinary as the plane took off at 7.30pm and rose into the already dark skies, leaving behind Rio's world-famous beaches and Sugar Loaf Mountain with its towering white statue of Christ, arms spread wide.
On board was a cross-section of humanity, more than half from Brazil and France but from 30 other nations as well - five Britons and three Irish among them. The passengers included a Brazilian prince, an 11-year-old boy returning to boarding school in England, a renowned conductor en route to a concert in Ukraine, European holidaymakers, students, academics and business executives, including the head of Michelin South America. A group of French salesmen had won a trip to Brazil for their performance, and a German was making a whistle-stop trip home to collect documents he needed to marry the Brazilian woman he had recently fallen in love with.
For about three hours the plane, under the command of Capt Marc Dubois, 58 - one of Air France's most experienced pilots with 11,000 flying hours under his belt, including 1,700 on this type of Airbus - flew north-east along the coast of Brazil.
The passengers ate their evening meals, selected from French wines to wash the food down, and then flicked between the in-flight movies - a past and present selection from the Cannes Film Festival - in the seat-back video or dozed off as the 11-hour overnight flight proceeded uneventfully.
The plane headed out into the Atlantic and one of three pilots sent the final sign-off from Brazilian air space at 22.33 after leaving behind the tropical archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. In the cockpit, Capt Dubois, married with two adult children, may have been talking about his latest home renovation plans. He was due to retire soon but told friends he loved the job so much, "I could work until I'm 70".
It is not known whether he or one of his two co-pilots was at the controls when they sent a message that they had encountered heavy electrically-charged tropical storms at 11pm. Nor is it known whether they discussed taking a detour to try to skirt the violent combination of lightning, ice, winds and updrafts of up to 100mph in the thunderclouds that spin up from the churning ocean waters to heights of 50,000 ft.
Such storms are common across the equator, in an area known by meteorologists as the "intertropical convergence zone", and the planes are built to survive them. But pilots will often fly far out of their way to avoid them, if only for the comfort of their passengers.
The towering clouds show up on radar and that night a Lufthansa crew in the area at a similar time steered through the turbulent skies while an Iberia pilot took a 30-mile detour to avoid turbulence and storms.
Flight AF447, however, ploughed into the middle of the buffeting winds, lightning and ice of the storm. Nervous flyers were doubtless already alarmed while even their more sanguine peers were probably preparing to tell stories about some of the worst turbulence they had encountered.
But beginning 10 minutes later, at 11.10pm, when the autopilot was disengaged, a barrage of 24 automated messages sent back from the plane's computer system to Air France headquarters charted the catastrophic failures of computer and electrical systems during its final desperate four minutes.
Faced by this onslaught of malfunctions, the three men in the cockpit frantically battled to keep control of their craft. It was a struggle they rapidly lost.
Finally at 11.14pm, with the pilots overwhelmed by the cascade of calamities, came the signal of complete electrical failure and "vertical speed" alert as all cabin pressure was lost – a strong indication for investigators that the plane split apart before spiralling down 35,000 feet in pieces through the storm. A report filed by a Spanish airline captain flying in the same area at the time said that he and his co-pilot saw a bright flash of white in the distance plunge into the ocean, although no connection has been proved.
Still the subject of conjecture is the cause of this disastrous chain of events, although the first strong clue came in a memo issued by Airbus on Thursday night to all airlines operating its 330 model.
It reminded pilots of the need to maintain appropriate speeds and angles for the plane when flying in adverse weather - too slow and the plane will stall; too fast and it could break up. For, according to leaks from the investigation, flight 447 was flying too slow for the conditions.
And the automated messages have revealed that all three external air speed sensors were giving different readings for the plane's velocity, diverging by up to 35 miles per hour – leaving pilots and on-board computer confused over what information to follow.
In previous crash investigations, it has emerged that sensors iced up in severe weather, despite being electrically heated. And moisture sucked up from the ocean by the 100pmh updrafts would have turned to heavy ice by the time it reached the plane's altitude.
French investigators also said on Saturday that Airbus had recommended last year that airlines flying the A330 should replace the sensors but that Air France had not changed the instruments, known as Pito tubes, on the plane that crashed. The day before, the airline said it had begun to replace Pitot tubes on its Airbus fleet.
But Paul-Louis Arslanian, the chief investigator, warned against "jumping to conclusions", saying that the sensors had not been shown to be at fault for the disaster and planes could fly safely with the old systems.
What can also only be conjecture is the terror that the passengers and crew must have felt during those final four minutes of the flight. But as the lights flared and failed, alarms sounded and the plane pitched and weaved horrendously, it can only have been horrific.
Some would have screamed in panic; other clutched hands with friends, lovers, even strangers, in mute shock and fear.
The 300 passengers on board a Qantas Airbus 330 whose flight computer put the plane into an unprovoked 650-ft dive last October can vouch for the terror of such an incident. More than 100 of the 300 on board were injured, some seriously, as passengers not wearing were seatbelts were sent hurtling around the cabin before the pilots overrode the computer and regained control.
Investigators probing last week's tragedy will also be studying whether there are any similarities with the Qantas Airbus malfunction, when the flight-control computer followed faulty information about the plane's wing angles, and ignored accurate data. It was the fourth, and most serious, such problem to occur on an Airbus 330.
The air forces of three countries last week scoured the churning equatorial waters of the mid-Atlantic, at first in the faint hope of finding survivors and later seeking bodies or any sign of wreckage. Naval vessels are also arriving in the search zone.
Nine Brazilian aircraft, including three Hercules, a US Navy Orion P-3 maritime patrol plane and French Falcon 50 flew out of the military air base in Natal, in Brazil's far north-east, leaving at 3am each morning to reach the main search area by daybreak.
For the airmen who returned in the sultry heat of the afternoon, the first few days of overhead sweeps were frustrating. "Water, just water, that's all we saw," said a Brazilian crewman after his Hercules landed on Friday.
Circling just 1,000 ft above the churning equatorial waters, the crews struggled to pick out debris from white-crested waves and tricks of the light as glaring sunlight and thick storm clouds alternated overhead.
The salvage operation took a serious blow on Thursday, two days after Brazilian defence minister Nelson Jobim confidently asserted that his country's search planes had spotted a debris field and an oil slick from the lost plane.
A Brazilian Lynx helicopter picked up the first piece of suspected AF 447 wreckage, a wooden cargo pallet, only to establish that the plane had carried no such items.
But on Saturday evening there appeared to be a breakthrough when the Brazilian air force announced that the first two bodies from the downed plane had been recovered, along with a seat and luggage. Details including a serial number from the seat and an Air France ticket claimed to have been found inside a leather case were being passed to Air France in Paris for confirmation that they came from the lost plane.
Yet as important as retrieving material from the surface will be for working out what went so catastrophically wrong that night, the key breakthrough would be to recover the black box and cockpit voice recorder from the bottom of the Atlantic.
The devices emit signals that can be picked up for 30 days, but to find them through 23,000 ft deep water on an ocean bed of underwater mountains and ravines is the sub-aqua equivalent of seeking a needle in a haystack.
Without black box or voice recorder, investigators may be never be able to explain why the pilots and plane were so dramatically overwhelmed.
For family and friends of Bianca Cotta and Carlos Eduardo de Melo, the only consolation may be to learn why the young couple whose marriage they had celebrated so joyously was snatched away from them just a day later.
There should have another new bride called Bianca on that flight. But as Bianca Igregas and Rodrigo Motta danced at their wedding reception in a hotel on Copacabana beach in the early hours of Sunday, they decided to postpone their departure by a day.
"The party was such fun and we were talking about the next day and what a rush we'd be in," Mrs Igregas told The Sunday Telegraph. "We knew we would not be able to relax and enjoy the next day so we decided impulsively not to fly."
That change of plans saved their lives as they too were booked to fly on AF 447. Instead, they flew on the same route on Monday.
Miss Igregas, 29, a lawyer, and Mr Motta, 32, who helps run the family car dealership, spoke to The Sunday Telegraph about their relief and sadness from Moscow, where they are now on honeymoon.
"We were in shock," Mr Motta said of the moment they heard of the missing plane. "We started crying and hugging each other."
Miss Igregas said that they were now "celebrating life, enjoying each moment. Such tragedies make you realise how you should live each moment of life intensely."
She added: "We thank God for giving us the chance of a life together. We were so moved by the story of the other Bianca, because that could have been our story."
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Sources: Telegraph.co.uk, Huffington Post, BBC, Wikipedia, Google Maps
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