Air France missing plane may be first fatal loss since Concorde

Air France-KLM Group, whose Rio de Janeiro-Paris flight disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean today, hasn’t suffered a fatal accident since the Concorde disaster almost nine years ago.

The twin-engine Airbus SAS A330 model involved has never had a fatal crash in a commercial flight.

Air France flight 447 with 228 people on board went missing after taking off from Brazil bound for Charles de Gaulle airport, according to a statement from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said he was “deeply concerned.” Air France said the plane had encountered an area of strong turbulence during the flight and an automatic message was received indicating a breakdown in the electrical circuitry.

“Modern airliners do not just go missing,” said David Learmount, safety editor at Flight International in London. “They were en route and should have been fine. The question is, what happened after the electrical fault, because a short circuit in itself should not bring down a plane. That would be different if there was a fire, for example.”

The Airbus A330-200 widebody jetliner, powered by two General Electric Co. CF680E engines, was last serviced on April 16 and had accumulated 18,870 flying hours after entering service in 2005, Air France said.

The pilot of the aircraft had accumulated 11,000 hours, including 1,100 on A330s. The two copilots respectively had 6,600 and 3,000 hours of flying.

Flight’s Learmount said Air France “has the safety record you’d expect from a big international airline.”

The crash of a Concorde supersonic jet in Paris in July 2000, which killed 113 people, was found to have been caused by a metal strip on the runway that punctured a tire, sending debris into to the fuel tank and starting a fire. Safety experts determined that the strip had fallen off another aircraft and absolved Air France of any responsibility.

The airline’s most serious incident since involved an Airbus A340 plane that skidded off a Toronto runway in August 2005 and burst into flames, the model’s first crash since its introduction in 1992. Some 309 passengers and crew got clear before the fire broke out and all survived.

The A330 model’s only fatal incident involved a prototype, said Paul Hayes, safety director at UK-based aviation consultancy Ascend. A plane operated by Air Transat of Canada ran out of fuel over the Atlantic in 2001 while carrying 306 people. It glided to an emergency landing.

The two-engine jetliner is a based on the four-engine A340 and debuted with Air Inter in Jan. 1994. The A330-200 extended-range variant can seat 253 people in three classes and first flew commercially in 1998.

Airbus said today that it has set up a crisis room following the disappearance of the Air France plane and has a flight-safety team in place.

Ascend’s Hayes said it’s unusual for incidents to happen when a plane is at cruising altitude.

“Accidents most frequently occur on the approach to landing,” he said in a telephone interview. “The next-most frequent is on takeoff. Generally, during climb and beyond, on route, you have very few accidents.”