HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 11/2-09 — Debris in Atlantic Ocean is wreckage from Air France flight that vanished carrying 228 people, Brazilian official says.

Brazilian military planes found a 3-mile path of wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean, confirming that an Air France jet carrying 228 people crashed in the sea, Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said Tuesday.

Jobim told reporters in Rio de Janeiro that the discovery “confirms that the plane went down in that area,” hundreds of miles from the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.

“There isn’t the slightest doubt that the debris is from the Air France plane,” Jobim said.

He said the strip of wreckage included metallic and nonmetallic pieces, but did not describe them in detail. No bodies were spotted in the crash of the Airbus A330 in which all aboard are believed to have died.

The discovery came just hours after authorities announced they had found an airplane seat, an orange buoy and signs of fuel in a part of the Atlantic Ocean where ocean depths range from less than one mile to more than three miles.

The search planes have been hampered by the same rough weather suspected of having a bearing on the crash, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips.

Jobim said recovery of the plane’s cockpit voice and data recorders and other wreckage could be difficult because much of the wreckage sank.

“It’s going to be very hard to search for it because it could be at a depth of 2,000 meters or 3,000 meters (1.2 miles to 1.8 miles) in that area of the ocean,” Jobim said.

The initial discovery of wreckage announced before Jobim spoke came about 36 hours after the jet went missing as it flew from Rio de Janeiro toward Paris.

A Brazilian air force spokesman said the two spots where debris was located suggested the pilots may have tried to turn the plane around to return to Fernando de Noronha.

“The locations where the objects were found are toward the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted,” said the spokesman, Col. Jorge Amaral. “That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis.”

Amaral said some of the debris was white and small, but did not describe it in more detail.

Jobim made the announcement after two commercial ships that joined the search late Tuesday morning reached sites where the debris was found, a Navy spokeswoman said.

“Once they come across the objects, they will be analyzed to determine if they are parts of the plane or just junk,” she said.

A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane and 21 crew members arrived in Brazil on Tuesday morning from El Salvador and was to begin overflying the zone in the afternoon, U.S. officials said in a statement. The plane can fly low over the ocean for about 12 hours at a time and has radar and sonar designed to track submarines underwater.

The French dispatched a research ship equipped with unmanned submarines to the debris site. The subs can explore depths of up to 19,600 feet. The U.S. was considering contributing unmanned underwater vehicles in the search as well, according to a defense source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

The 4-year-old plane was last heard from at 0214 GMT Monday (10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday) about four hours after it left Rio.

If no survivors are found, it would be the world’s worst civil aviation disaster since the November 2001 crash of an American Airlines jetliner in the New York City borough of Queens that killed 265 people.

Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the plane down, with few clues to go on. Potential causes include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors.

Whatever happened, it happened in the zone of extreme weather known as the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone. That is where prevailing winds from the north and south hemisphere’s meet, causing violent thunderheads that can reach up beyond 50,000 feet – higher than commercial planes can fly.