Brazilian military planes spotted debris in the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday that could be wreckage of a missing Air France flight carrying 228 people that apparently crashed in a storm the previous day.Air force pilots saw metallic objects, plane seats, an orange buoy and jet fuel stains in the water about 650 km north of the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha off Brazil's northeastern coast.Brazil's navy said a Dutch commercial ship was nearby and would arrive in the area shortly. Brazilian navy ships, one carrying a helicopter, were not expected to arrive in the area until Wednesday.The chances of finding survivors appeared close to nil and authorities were treating the passenger list as a death toll."The plan now is to focus our efforts to collect the debris and try to identify if they belong or not to the Air France plane," Brazilian Air Force Colonel Jorge Amaral told reporters in Brasilia, the capital.Three Brazilian air force Hercules planes took off from the islands of Fernando de Noronha, which sit about 370 km off the coast of South America, early on Tuesday to look for traces of the Airbus A330.The area is near where the last contact was made with the flight that took off for Paris from Rio de Janeiro on Sunday night and went missing in storms about four hours later without sending any distress signal.Brazil's air force last had contact with the plane at 0133 GMT on Monday when it was 565 km from Brazil's coast. The last automated signals were received at 0214 GMT.If no survivors are found, it would be the worst disaster in Air France's 75-year history and the deadliest since one of the company's supersonic Concorde planes crashed in 2000.Air France flight 447 sent an automatic message reporting electrical faults before it went missing. But aviation experts said they did not have enough information to understand how a modern plane with an excellent safety record and operated by three experienced pilots could have crashed.
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