June 4 (Bloomberg) -- Nelson Marinho Filho, a machinery mechanic who worked on oil platforms, was on his way to Angola for his second stint at an African petroleum field when Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean this week.

The 40-year-old employee at the Brazilian unit of Saipem SpA loved the energy industry and couldn’t see himself doing anything else in life, said his father, Nelson Marinho.

“He was very happy to go to Angola again; he loved his job,” Marinho said in an interview at a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, where relatives of victims of the Air France Airbus accident gathered to wait for information. “His life ended just like that. We still can’t believe it.”

The flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down three days ago with 228 people aboard, including executives and workers in the oil, steel and banking industries. Sixty-one French nationals, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans and people of at least 10 other nationalities were aboard, according to a statement from the airline.

Debris from the Airbus SAS A330-200 has been found about 650 kilometers (405 miles) northeast of Brazil’s Fernando de Noronha Island, off the country’s northeastern coast. Brazil’s Air Force said yesterday it is still working under the assumption there are survivors.

Later Flight

Swedish national Christine Badre Schnabl, 34, who worked at the Swedish-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce and at the Norwegian consulate in Rio de Janeiro, was on the flight with her 5-year- old son, Philippe, according to Kjetil Bergmann, director of corporate communications at Innovation Norway. Her husband, Fernando, and 3-year-old daughter, Celine, took a later flight to Paris that same night, Bergmann said.

“She was very involved in volunteer work at an institution that helps young women in Rio,” he said in a phone interview from Oslo. “She was the kind of person who liked to help others.”

Pedro Luiz de Orleans e Braganca, 26, a descendant of Pedro II, Brazil’s last emperor, was also on the flight. He was flying to Luxembourg, where he lived, said Carlos Eduardo de Artagao, a friend of the family. The emperor was deposed in 1889.

“He was a Brazilian prince who worked at a bank,” de Artagao said, not revealing the name of the company. He would be fourth in line to the Brazilian throne if the country were to become a monarchy, and had come to Brazil to visit his family in Petropolis, where its summer palace is located, de Artagao said.

Birth Mother Search

One of the Italian victims, Georg Martiner, 24, was of Brazilian origin and had been adopted at age 3. He grew up in the Dolomites in Italy’s north, speaking a mountain dialect and snowboarding. He was returning from his first trip to his native country in search of his birth mother, Turin’s La Stampa reported.

Marco Mendonca, 44, manganese and alloys director at Vale SA, the world’s largest iron ore producer, was on his way to China and Dubai to collect a prize, according to Fernando Thompson, a Vale spokesman.

“He was a brilliant professional and one of Vale’s greatest talents,” Thompson said.

Trained as a mining engineer, Mendonca had worked at Vale since 2000 and was recently appointed a director of the International Manganese Institute. He was married to Renata Mondelo Mendonca, a communications specialist at Vale in Rio de Janeiro and mother of the couple’s 11-month-old baby.

‘Terrible Day’

StatoilHydro ASA, Norway’s largest oil and natural-gas producer, lost three employees in the crash: Geologist Marcela Pellizzon, 29; and lawyers Gustavo Peretti, 30, and Kristian Berg Andersen, 37, according to a statement posted on the company’s Web site. They were traveling to the company’s headquarters in Stavanger, Norway.

“This has been a terrible day for us, and the loss of three fine colleagues is very hard to bear,” said Jorge Camargo, StatoilHydro’s manager in Brazil.

Erich Walter Heine, 41, president of Companhia Siderurgica do Atlantico SA, a unit of ThyssenKrupp AG, was asked a year ago by the Dusseldorf-based company to take on a project in southeast Brazil that was experiencing delays and cost overruns, Gilberto Lima, a company spokesman, said by phone from Rio.

“Erich was the person most suited and most qualified to take on this complex task,” Lima said. “He was the man for the job.” Heine, a native of South Africa, was married with three children and was traveling on business to Germany.

Argentine-born Pablo Gabriel Dreyfus, 38, a specialist in firearms control, was traveling with his wife Ana Carolina Rodrigues, 28, to attend a conference in Geneva, said Ana Carolina Oliveira, a high school friend of Rodrigues. They worked at Viva Rio, a non-governmental organization, and helped residents of Rio de Janeiro who were victims of violence.

“They were going to spend a romantic time in Paris before the conference, they were so in love,” Oliveira said in a phone interview from Rio de Janeiro.

To contact the reporters on this story: Adriana Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro at abrasileiro@bloomberg.net; Jeb Blount in Rio de Janeiro at jblount@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 4, 2009 10:52 EDT