June 2 (Bloomberg) -- Brazilian authorities said that a debris field spotted in the ocean today confirms that an Air France Airbus plane with 228 people on board crashed into the Atlantic.

The material, including a plane seat, an orange life buoy and traces of oil, was discovered in an area about 650 kilometers (400 miles) northeast of Brazil’s Fernando de Noronha island, which is off Brazil’s northeastern coast, Colonel Jorge Amaral told reporters in Brasilia today.

A Brazilian patrol ship will reach the wreckage tomorrow at about 11 a.m. New York time, according to a Navy statement. The debris also contained wire and metal pieces, Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim told reporters in Rio de Janeiro today.

“A Hercules plane spotted a debris line stretching 5 kilometers, which confirms the plane crashed in that area,” Jobim said.

Brazil and France had dispatched spotter planes, helicopters and navy vessels to locate the Airbus A330-200, which lost contact yesterday after hitting turbulence as it flew to Paris from Rio. The U.S. military is also assisting in the search, the Navy said in a statement.

It could be “weeks or months” before any cause is determined, French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said in an interview on French radio station Europe One.

The French government said there’s no evidence of terrorism.

Automatic Alerts

“No hypothesis is favored,” French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told the National Assembly today. “There were no distress calls from the plane, but regular automatic alerts for three minutes indicating that all systems went out.”

Air France said it isn’t ruling out a lightning strike on the aircraft, which reported an electrical-circuit breakdown and sent 10 automated distress messages before it vanished. Amaral said the wreckage was found away from the flight path, suggesting the plane may have attempted to turn back.

The plane probably flew into thunderstorms that stretched for 400 miles, towered as high as 50,000 feet and could have produced lightning, State College, Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather.com said today in a press release.

Updrafts as strong as 100 mph may have resulted from the storms, creating “severe” turbulence, the service said.

France has mobilized three sea patrol planes, a military surveillance aircraft and two warships, Fillon said.

Emergency Beacons

Emergency beacons on the aircraft and “pingers” on the so-called black boxes may be difficult to locate.

“It’s a time trial in very difficult conditions,” Fillon said.

The water in the area is about 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) deep, Amaral told Globo News, a Brazilian TV news channel.

Air France said it may release the passenger list tomorrow. Those on board included 58 Brazilians, 61 French and 26 Germans as well as more than a dozen other nationalities, Air France said in a press release.

Luis Roberto Anastacio, Michelin & Cie.’s chief executive for Latin America, and Erich Heine, chairman of ThyssenKrupp AG’s CSA steel mill in Brazil, were on board, the companies said. StatoilHydro ASA, Norway’s largest oil and natural-gas producer, said three employees were on the flight.

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

Qantas Incident

One high-profile incident with an A330 that didn’t include fatalities occurred on Oct. 7, 2008, when passengers and crew on a Qantas Airways Ltd. flight from Singapore to Perth were slammed into the cabin ceiling after the plane abruptly lost altitude. Fourteen people had serious injuries.

Australian air-safety investigators said a month later that a fault in a flight system computer component may have caused the nosedive. In a preliminary report, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said one of three systems on the plane known as air data inertial reference units fed incorrect information to the main flight computer. The investigation is still under way.

Airbus today said there’s no way of knowing yet whether there are similarities in the two cases.

“It’s premature to link the incidents as long as the investigators don’t have the flight recorder to give more visibility on what happened,” said Stefan Schaffrath, a company spokesman, in a phone interview from Airbus’s Toulouse, France, headquarters.

A330 Accidents

He said there are more than 600 A330s flying worldwide that have logged a total of 30 million flight hours. There had been two accidents until yesterday: the crash of a test aircraft in 1994 and an incident with Air Transat where the plane ran out of fuel because of a maintenance issue. The second involved no fatalities.

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

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

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.

2009 Accidents

This is the third fatal accident of 2009 involving scheduled airlines, Hayes, the aviation consultant, said.

A Turkish Airlines plane on Feb. 25 crashed near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, killing five passengers and four crew and injuring 28. The plane was a Boeing 737-800.

On Feb. 12, a Bombardier Inc. Dash 8 Q400 turboprop crashed in Clarence Center, New York, as it approached Buffalo’s airport on a flight from Newark, New Jersey. The dead included one person on the ground and all 49 people on the plane, operated by Pinnacle’s Colgan unit for Continental Airlines Inc.

To contact the reporters on this story: Francisco Marcelino in Sao Paulo at mdeoliveira@bloomberg.net; Laurence Frost in Paris at lfrost4@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 2, 2009 16:55 EDT