An Air France Airbus A330-200 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard is missing after reporting an electrical-circuit breakdown and encountering turbulence, the airline said.

The plane lost contact far from Brazil’s Atlantic coast, Air France-KLM Group Chief Executive Officer Pierre Henri Gourgeon told a news conference. The company isn’t ruling out a lightning strike on the aircraft, said Francois Brousse, head of communications. The plane encountered strong turbulence at 4 a.m. Paris time and sent automatic distress signals at 4:14 a.m., the company said.

The chances of finding survivors are “at the moment, tiny,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters at Charles de Gaulle airport, where Flight 447 had been scheduled to land today at 11:15 a.m. Paris time. “We don’t have any precise element about what happened. It’s a disaster like Air France has never seen before.” Sarkozy had joined Transportation Minister Dominique Bussereau and Energy Minister Jean-Louis Borloo at a crisis center set up at the airport. Borloo ruled out a hijacking, Agence France-Presse said.

The flight disappeared from radar screens between the Brazilian city of Natal and the Cape Verde island of Ilha do Sal, according to a Brazilian air force colonel speaking on Brazil’s CBN radio. There was no hope for the airliner, AFP cited an unidentified airport official as saying.

Search for Plane

The Brazilian Defense Ministry said it was searching for the Airbus. Brazilian authorities last heard from the crew at 11 p.m. local time, the ministry said. The search was taking place near the island of Fernando de Noronha, 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) northeast of Rio de Janeiro, the Associated Press said. A French military plane took off from Dakar, Senegal, to join the effort, Bussereau said.

The Brazilian Navy said it is sending three ships to take part in the search and will focus on an area that is about 1,100 kilometers from Natal and 770 kilometers from Fernando de Noronha.

Authorities are still checking to determine the names of those on board the missing aircraft, Bussereau said. They include eight children, one of them a baby, AFP reported.

Michelin & Cie.’s Chief Executive for Latin America Luis Roberto Anastacio and another Brazilian executive were on the flight, the company said.

Brazilian citizens accounted for 37 percent of passengers of the missing flight, said Jorge Assuncao, manager of Air France in the Rio de Janeiro International Airport. French citizens accounted for 34 percent of the plane’s passengers, Assuncao told reporters in Rio.

Lightning Strikes

While aircraft can be damaged by lightning strikes, few crash as a result. “Planes get hit quite frequently by lightning, just about every day,” Henry Margusity, a meteorologist at Accuweather.com, based in State College, Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview.

Storms in that area can take place as high as 50,000 feet (15,520 meters), higher than the plane would have been flying, because commercial planes tend to cruise at 30,000 or 35,000 feet, he said.

“We don’t know at what altitude the plane was flying, but lightning tends to be more concentrated at the top part of the thunderstorm, as it’s coldest there, so it could have been towering at 10,000 feet above the plane,” Margusity said.

There was no evidence of lightning over the Atlantic, though lightning occurred on Brazil’s north coast near the town of Sao Luis, close to where the plane might have flown, he said.

The A330, a twin-engine airliner that carries about 250 people, has never had a fatal crash in commercial flight, though a development model crashed shortly after takeoff during testing, according to Paul Hayes, director of safety at Ascend, an aviation consultant in the U.K.

Flight Record

The missing Airbus was delivered to Air France in April 2005 and had flown for about 18,000 hours on some 2,500 flights, the manufacturer said in a statement. The company said it is offering technical assistance on the investigation into the incident. Airbus declined to comment on the cause.

The plane last underwent maintenance on April 16, Air France-KLM said.

Hayes said it would be highly unusual for an aircraft to go down in flight, either in climbing to its flight path or 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, en route, you have very few accidents. With no information, we can’t even speculate about it.”

The last time Air France had a fatal accident was in July 2000, when one of its supersonic Concordes crashed. A metal strip that fell to the runway from another plane in Paris punctured one of the Concorde’s tires, sending debris into the fuel tank and starting a fire.

A toll free number, 0800 800 812, is available inside France for emergency enquiries about the flight. Outside France, the number to call is +33-1-57-02-1055.

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