U.S. & World

SAO PAULO, Brazil (CBS) ― An airplane seat, an orange buoy, metallic debris and signs of fuel were found in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday by Brazilian military pilots searching for a missing Air France airliner.

The debris was spotted from the air about 410 miles north of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, roughly along the path that the jet was taking before it disappeared with 228 people on board, said Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral.

There were no signs of life in two sightings of separate debris areas about 35 miles apart.

"The locations where the objects were found are towards the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," Amaral said. "That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis."

Amaral said authorities would not be able to confirm that the debris is from the plane until they can retrieve some of it from the ocean for identification. Brazilian military ships are not expected to arrive at the area until Wednesday.

The discovery came more than 24 hours after the jet bound from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went missing, with all feared dead, which would make this the world's deadliest commercial airline disaster since 2001.

Brazil's military says the night the plane went missing, commercial pilots in the area reported what could have been a trail of fire on the water, reports CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata.

French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said bad weather made the search difficult Tuesday, with heavy clouds forcing search planes to fly very low over the water, limiting their line of sight.

"For the time being we can't find anything," he said. "There are a lot of squalls, a lot of storms."

Rescuers were still scanning a vast sweep of ocean extending from far off northeastern Brazil to waters off West Africa. The 4-year-old Airbus A330 was last heard from at 10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday.

The crew gave no verbal messages of distress before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting loss of pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of feet below the surface.

The chance of finding survivors now "is very very small, even nonexistent," said the French minister overseeing transportation, Jean-Louis Borloo. "The race against the clock has begun" to find the plane's two black boxes.

Finding the jet may hinge on picking up a signal from the plane's transponders, which can ping for about 30 days once they hit water, said CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes. But the plane may be under 10,000 feet of water.

The area covers a steep underwater mountain range "as big as the Andes," Prazuck said, which will make further exploration and recovery operations extremely difficult.

Air France said Tuesday that none of the plane's emergency locator beacons had been detected, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips, another indication the incident may have taken place extremely quickly.

Aviation Expert Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said on CBS' The Early Show that the automatic signals sent out from the plane indicating electrical problems and a loss of cabin pressure were "very ominous messages. These are automatic messages that are sent to the operations base of the air carrier, usually, for maintenance issues.

"I think what it indicated was that the plane was likely coming apart at that moment," he said.

France's junior minister for transport, Dominique Bussereau, predicted a "very long investigation; it could be several days, several weeks, or several months."

President Barack Obama told French television stations the United States was ready to do everything necessary to find out what happened to the missing plane. France has sought U.S. satellite help to find the wreckage.

Investigators on both sides of the ocean worked through the night to determine what brought Air France 447 down - wind and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning, or a catastrophic combination of factors.

France's Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" indicating terrorism was involved, but told French radio "all hypotheses must be studied."

Alain Bouillard, who led the probe into the crash of the Concorde in July 2000, was put in charge of the accident investigation team.

French police were studying passenger lists and maintenance records, and preparing to take DNA from passengers' relatives to help identify any bodies.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, said the cause is unclear and that "no hypothesis" is being excluded. He called it "a catastrophe like Air France has never before known."

Chief Air France spokesman Francois Brousse said "it is possible" the plane was hit by lightning, but aviation experts expressed doubt that a bolt of lightning was enough to bring the plane down.

"They're built to take whatever Mother Nature can throw at them, especially electrically," Jack Casey, head of Safety Operating Systems, told Cordes.

Casey, a former airline pilot himself, has experienced multiple in-flight lightning strikes and explains that modern jetliners are equipped with redundant electrical systems, so if one goes bad, another should take over.

Without the kind of evidence that wreckage can provide, Goelz said theories about lightning bringing down the plane are simply "grasping for straws.

"You know, modern planes are designed to shed that kind of electricity," he told Early Show host Julie Chen. "Commercial aircraft are hit by lightning virtually every day, and they are not severely affected. But that's certainly one issue you're going to have to look at."

Air France's manager in Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Assuncao, told reporters that the two biggest groups of nationalities on board were Brazilian and French. Other passengers were American, Angolan, Argentine, Belgian, British, Chinese, Filipino, German, Irish, Italian, Moroccan, Norwegian, Spanish and Slovakian.

A State Department official confirmed two U.S. citizens were on board the flight. State Department officials were in touch with family members of the two individuals, according to CBS News reporter Charles Wolfson.

The Americans are Anne and Michael Harris, formerly of The Woodlands, Tex. The couple had been living in Rio de Janiero, where Michael Harris worked since July, reported CBS affiliate KHOU in Houston.

They were traveling to Paris for a training seminar for Michael, then a vacation, according to family members.

Air France Flight 447, a four-year-old Airbus A330, left Rio on Sunday at 7:03 p.m. local time (2203 GMT, 6:03 p.m. EDT) with 216 passengers and 12 crew members onboard, said company spokeswoman Brigitte Barrand.

Timeline: Disappearance Of Air France Flight 447

The plane indicated it was still flying normally more than three hours later as it left Brazil radar contact, beyond the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, at 10:48 local time (9:48 p.m. EDT). It was flying at 35,000 feet and traveling at 522 mph.

About a half-hour later, the plane "crossed through a thunderous zone with strong turbulence." It sent an automatic message fourteen minutes later at 0214 GMT (10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday) reporting electrical failure and a loss of cabin pressure.

Air France told Brazilian authorities the last information they heard was that automated message reporting a technical problem before the plane reached a monitoring station near the Cape Verde islands. Brazilian, African, Spanish and French air traffic controllers tried in vain to establish contact with the plane, the company said.

Brazilian Air Force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said seven aircraft had been deployed to search the area far off the northeastern Brazilian coast. Brazil's Navy sent three ships.

"We want to try to reach the last point where the aircraft made contact, which is about 745 miles northeast of Natal," Amaral told Globo TV.

Meteorologists said tropical storms over that part of the Atlantic are much more violent than thunderstorms in the United States and elsewhere.

"Tropical thunderstorms... can tower up to 50,000 feet. At the altitude it was flying, it's possible that the Air France plane flew directly into the most charged part of the storm - the top," Henry Margusity, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com, said in a statement.

In Washington, a Pentagon official said he'd seen no indication that terrorism or foul play was involved. He spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject.

In Brazil, sobbing relatives were flown to Rio de Janeiro, where Air France was assisting the families. Andres Fernandes, his eyes tearing up, said a relative "was supposed to be on the flight, but we need to confirm it," Globo TV reported.

At the Charles de Gaulle airport north of Paris, family members declined to speak to reporters and were brought to a cordoned-off crisis center.

Air France said it expressed "its sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of the passengers and crew members" aboard Flight 447. The airline did not explicitly say there were no survivors, leaving that subject to Sarkozy.

Air France-KLM CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said the pilot had 11,000 hours of flying experience, including 1,700 hours flying this aircraft.

Experts said the absence of a mayday call meant something happened very quickly.

"The conclusion to be drawn is that something catastrophic happened on board that has caused this airplane to ditch in a controlled or an uncontrolled fashion," Jane's Aviation analyst Chris Yates told The Associated Press. "Potentially it went down very quickly and so quickly that the pilot on board didn't have a chance to make that emergency call."

If all 228 people were killed, it would be the deadliest commercial airline disaster since Nov. 12, 2001, when an American Airlines jetliner crashed in the New York City borough of Queens during a flight to the Dominican Republic, killing 265 people. On Feb. 19, 2003, 275 people were killed in the crash of an Iranian military plane carrying members of the Revolutionary Guards as it prepared to land at Kerman airport in Iran.

The worst single-plane disaster was in 1985 when a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountainside after losing part of its tail fin, killing 520 people.

The Airbus A330-200 is a twin-engine, long-haul, medium-capacity passenger jet that can hold up to 253 passengers. There are 341 in use worldwide, flying up to 7,760 miles a trip.

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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