Pilot saw 'intense white flash' where plane went down

Sao Paulo/Paris - A pilot for a Spanish airline saw a 'white flash' in the area where an Air France jetliner plunged into the Atlantic, raising the possibility that it was brought down by an explosion, the Spanish daily El Mundo reported Thursday. Two pilots and a passenger who was in the galley of the Air Comet plane, which was traveling the route between Lima, Peru, and Madrid, 'suddenly saw far away a strong and intense flash of white light' which then plunged vertically downwards and disappeared in six seconds, the pilot wrote in a report to his airline. The sighting took place early Monday, when the Airbus A330-200, traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, plunged into the sea with 228 people aboard. The pilot also said that he observed storms with intense electrical activity and cloud formations near his route. Air Comet said it had passed the report on to the Spanish civil aviation authorities, Airbus and Air France. The report reignited the hypothesis of an explosion as the cause of the accident, adding another element to the search for an explanation for what caused the worst commercial air disaster since 2001. The French daily Le Figaro reported Thursday that an individual close to the investigation into the crash said that the aircraft may have been torn apart by an explosion or by a very powerful storm. 'We can see fragments (of the plane) spread over a distance of more than 300 kilometres,' the individual said, speaking on condition that his name not be used. 'This first element suggests an explosion that struck the aircraft in full flight, rather than destruction in contact with the sea.' This hypothesis does not contradict the possibility of a terrorist bomb or a sudden disintegration caused by violent weather. However, a German aviation expert told the German Press Agency dpa that the final messages sent by the aircraft before it plunged into the sea early Monday appear to contradict the theory of a violent explosion. In an interview with the German Press Agency dpa, Heinrich Grossbongardt described a four-minute time span between 0210 and 0214 GMT Monday in which the Airbus A330-200 apparently experienced severe technical problems before all contact was lost. At 0210, the plane's system reported that the crew had turned off the automatic pilot in order to fly the plane manually. This means that the cause of the disaster was probably not violent, because 'it shows that the pilots tried to deal with the problem.' After the Brazilian Air Force searched Tuesday and Wednesday over tens of thousands of square kilometres of ocean, the Brazilian Navy was expected to concentrate Thursday on a 230-square-kilometre defined zone near the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Islets, a small, uninhabited archipelago that is home to a Brazilian Navy scientific station. 'There is no doubt that the crash site is in this place,' Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim said. Recovery workers face difficult challenges, with strong currents and uneven topography in the region, where the Atlantic plunges to a depth of 4,000 metres and has spiking underwater mountain peaks. France has sent a vessel carrying diving equipment that can reach 6,000 metres down.