They lost a plane!

An Air France passenger jet traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared and was presumed to have crashed after its electrical systems malfunctioned during a violent electric storm on Sunday evening. Officials said Monday that a search had begun for the wreckage in a vast swath of the Atlantic Ocean.


Experts were at a loss to explain fatal damage to a modern jetliner from either lightning or turbulence, even that of a tropical storm.

“Air France is extremely distraught and the whole team of Air France is suffering,” Pierre Henri Gourgeon, the chief executive of Air France-KLM, told reporters in Paris. “We would like to say to the relatives of the victims that we are totally with them and will make every effort to help them.”

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said: “It’s a tragic accident. The chances of finding survivors are tiny.”

The plane, an Airbus 330-200, was carrying 216 passengers, 9 cabin crew members and 3 pilots, the airline said. In all, people of 32 nationalities were on the plane, most of them Brazilian or European. There were also two Americans, the airline said.

The flight took off from Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 Eastern time), and its last verbal communication with air traffic control was three hours later, at 10:33 p.m., according to a statement from the Aeronautica, the agency in charge of Brazilian air space. At that time the flight was at 35,000 feet and traveling 520 miles per hour.

About a half-hour after the radio call, the plane encountered an electrical storm with “very heavy turbulence,” said an Air France spokeswoman in Paris, Brigitte Barrand. The last communication from the plane was 14 minutes later — a series of automatic messages indicating that the aircraft had suffered an electrical-system malfunction, Air France officials said in Paris. The Associated Press reported that it also suffered a loss of cabin pressure.

“A completely unexpected situation occurred on board the aircraft,” Mr. Gourgeon of Air France told France’s LCI television.

Brazilian officials said the plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean between the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 186 miles northeast of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal, and Ilha do Sal, one of the Cape Verde islands off the coast of Africa. It is a huge area of ocean, three times the size of Europe, officials said.

The plane went missing in a zone known to sailors and pilots as the “horse latitudes” — an area of intertropical convergence close to the Equator particularly susceptible to storms and violent wind changes, said Julien Gourguechon, who has been an Air France pilot for a decade.

In the area, thunderstorms are possible at altitudes of up to 55,000 feet. Weather reports from the time of the incident indicated high clouds and isolated thunderstorms, CNN reported.

The plane was flying beyond the reach of Brazilian and Senegalese radar when it went missing — a gap that always occurs for aircraft on long trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights.

The Brazilian Air Force sent two planes to search for wreckage, an air force spokesman, Col. Henry Munhoz, told O Globo television in Brazil, and three ships from the Brazilian Navy were sent out. A French Air Force plane joined the search from a base in Senegal, Africa, as did a Spanish plane, news services reported.

The head of investigation and accident prevention for Brazil’s Civil Aeronautics Agency, Douglas Ferreira Machado, told O Globo that he calculated that, given its speed, the plane must have left Brazilian waters by the time contact was lost.

“It’s going to take a long time to carry out this search,” The A.P. quoted him as saying. “It could be a long, sad story. The black box will be at the bottom of the sea.”

The automatic messages, which were possibly triggered by a number of alarms on the aircraft, were likely received by satellite by the Air France maintenance system, Mr. Gourguechon said. He added that the cause of the plane’s “clearly exceptional” disappearance, apparently with no distress signal, was unlikely to be purely meteorological.

“Lightning alone is not enough to explain the loss of this plane,” he said. “Turbulence alone isn’t enough to explain it. It is always a combination of factors.”

All jets are built to withstand severe turbulence and lightning strikes.

By some estimates, most jetliners are hit by lightning at least once a year. But the bolt — which is really a flow of electrons from one charged part of a cloud to another — normally passes through the plane’s aluminum skin and out the tail or a wingtip, dispersing in the cloud without damaging the plane. Passengers are protected by the plastic interior and vital equipment is shielded, so pilots usually report nothing more serious than a flickering of lights from the electrical pulse.

A loss of cabin pressure suggests a break in the fuselage or a part torn loose. But planes are built to withstand the sudden drops that occur when a plane hits a pocket of low-pressure air, even though passengers may be frightened by the bouncing of the wings.

The missing aircraft was relatively new, having gone into service in April 2005. Its last maintenance check in the hangar took place on April 16 of this year, Air France said in a statement.

Pilots are trained to try to avoid flying directly through thunderstorms, and instead try to find an opening in a storm front through which to guide their plane. Ms. Barrand said that the pilot of the missing jet was very experienced, having clocked 11,000 flying hours, including 1,100 hours on Airbus 330 jets.

The Airbus 330 that disappeared is one of the newer “fly-by-wire” airplanes, in which signals to move the flaps are sent through wires to small motors in the wings rather than through cables or hydraulic tubing.

Lightning can induce pulses of current in wires it is near but not traveling through, but modern jetliners are normally insulated against that and have surge protectors

The aircraft has backup systems in the case of a power failure — including a turbine that lowers into the airstream to provide energy for basic flight functions, and a battery for wing and landing gear settings for emergency landing.

But the backup power is limited, and in an emergency, pilots might hesitate to use the radio to conserve power for more critical functions, aviation experts said. Planes have been brought down by lightning strikes in the past, though it is rare.

The last commercial crash in the United States attributed to lightning was in 1967, when a fuel tank exploded.

In 1988, a twin-engine turboprop was struck by lightning over Germany and crashed, killing all 21 people aboard. In 2006, a plane carrying Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was struck by lightning and had to land, his spokeswoman said at the time.

Flight AF 447 was scheduled to arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:10 a.m. local time. Stricken relatives, weeping or hiding behind dark sunglasses, descended on terminal 2D, where the airline on Monday established a crisis center, plus another in Rio. A black-robed priest could be seen making his way past hordes of police, passengers and media to comfort relatives at Paris airport.

There were 58 Brazilians and 61 French people on board, Air France said Monday afternoon in a statement based on information from Brazilian authorities. The plane also carried 26 Germans, 9 Chinese, 9 Italians and 2 Americans, the statement said (an earlier breakdown provided by an airline official had different numbers).

One man at the airport in Paris, Luis Carlos Machado, 40, a policeman from Criciuma, Brazil, was waiting to take an Air France flight to Rio that had been delayed by the disruption. One of his colleagues, Deise Possamai, 34, was on the missing flight. He said he had been indirectly in contact with her parents and said they had given up all hope.

“It’s a really strange feeling to have to fly this route now,” he said.

French and Brazilian aviation authorities are expected to lead the investigation, but the United States National Transportation Safety Board may be involved because the plane was carrying American passengers and was powered by two General Electric-made jet engines.

The A330 jet, which carries about 250 passengers, is a workhorse of long-distance aviation, used on routes where passenger demand was not big enough to warrant the use of the larger Boeing 777.

No Airbus 330-200 passenger flight has ever been involved in a fatal crash, according to the Aviation Safety Network, though the seven-person crew of a test flight died in a June 30, 1994, crash near Toulouse, France, where Airbus is based. The test was meant to simulate an engine failure at low speed with maximum angle of climb.

In October 2008, an A330 operated by Qantas on a flight from Singapore to Perth had to be diverted for an emergency landing near the Australian town of Exmouth after suddenly losing altitude. Dozens of passengers and crew members were injured.