Air France Jet Crashed in Ocean: Brazilian Official

Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim says a 3-mile (5-kilometer) path of wreckage found in the Atlantic Ocean confirmed that an Air France jet crashed in the sea.

Jobin said Tuesday that discovery of the debris by Brazilian military pilots "confirms that the plane went down in that area" hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.

Brazilian military pilots hunting Tuesday for the missing jet spotted an airplane seat, an orange buoy and signs of fuel in a part of the Atlantic Ocean with depths of up to three miles.

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The pilots spotted two areas of floating debris—but no signs of life—about 35 miles (60 kilometers) apart, about 410 miles (650 kilometers) beyond the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, near Flight 447's path from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, said Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral.

The discovery came about 36 hours after the jet went missing, with all 228 on board feared dead.

"The locations where the objects were found are toward 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 some of the debris was white and small, but did not describe it in more detail.

Sea depths vary dramatically in the areas where the rubble was spotted, ranging from slightly less than a mile to three miles (1,600 to 4,800 meters) deep, experts said. Brazilian military officials declined to release the precise coordinates.

Two of the commercial ships that joined the search late Tuesday morning reached sites where the debris was found, a Navy spokeswoman said.

A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane and 21 crew members arrived in Brazil Tuesday morning from El Salvador and was to begin overflying the zone in the afternoon, U.S. officials said in a statement. The plane can fly low over the ocean for about 12 hours at a time and has radar and sonar designed to track submarines underwater.

Rescuers scanned a vast sweep of ocean extending from far off northeastern Brazil to waters off West Africa. The 4-year-old plane was last heard from at 10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday about four hours after it left Rio.

If no survivors are found, it would be the world's worst civil aviation disaster since the November 2001 crash of an American Airlines jetliner in the New York City borough of Queens that killed 265 people.

Reports of Lost Cabin Pressure

Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the Airbus A330 down, with few clues to go on. Potential causes include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors.

The crew made no distress call before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost cabin pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of feet (meters) below the surface.

The Airbus A330-200 was cruising normally at 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) and 522 mph (840 kph) just before it disappeared. No trouble was reported as the plane left radar contact, beyond Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archipelago.

But just north of the equator, a line of towering thunderstorms loomed. Bands of extremely turbulent weather stretched across the Atlantic toward Africa.

- CNBC.com staff contributed to this report.

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