We’re calling it an incident, but everyone is expecting the worst: a catastrophic accident in the disappearance of Air France’s flight 447, which left Rio De Janeiro last night and hasn’t been heard from since. Search crews still haven’t found any wreckage, but with this much time off radar we can only speculate that the aircraft met with a bitter end. Judging from the passenger manifests, as would be expected, the nation of Brazil will be one of the hardest hit in terms of victims, second only to France:

The airline company identified the nationalities of the victims as two Americans, an Argentinean, an Austrian, a Belgian, 58 Brazilians, five British, a Canadian, nine Chinese, a Croatian, a Dane, a Dutch, an Estonian, a Filipino, 61 French, a Gambian, 26 Germans, four Hungarians, three Irish, one Icelandic, nine Italians, five Lebanese, two Moroccans, three Norwegians, two Polish, one Romanian, one Russian, three Slovakian, two Spanish, one Swedish, six Swiss and one Turk.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy just met with families at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, and was straight with them, saying that the possibility for finding survivors was “very low”.

As the story develops, multiple theories are swirling, among them that the plane met with foul weather and was brought down by a lightning strike, by turbulence or a combination of both, given that the aircraft was flying through rough conditions as it sent out an automatic message notifying Air France maintenance of faulty mechanical equipment.

Via / CNN