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Confirmation that Air France's Flight 447 had been doomed was the lead story on all three newscasts, the unanimous Story of the Day. Debris from the crashed Airbus 330 has been located in the Atlantic Ocean off the northeast coast of Brazil. The jetliner went missing amid heavy thunderstorms en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 216 passengers on board and a crew of twelve. NBC anchored its newscast from the East Room of the White House where Brian Williams was preparing to file a two-part primetime behind-the-scenes documentary Inside the Obama White House.

There may have been unanimity that the Air France crash was the Story of the Day but there was diametrically opposite reporting on what had been discovered. CBS' Mark Phillips and NBC's Lester Holt, both filing from Paris, told us that searchers had found two separate fields of debris, 35 miles apart, "indicating that the plane may have broken up at higher altitude, as CBS' Phillips put it. Washington-based Lisa Stark on ABC told us that a single debris field had been found "that stretches some three miles across the ocean surface." That narrowness led ABC's in-house aviation consultant John Nance to conclude that "the airplane entered the water pretty much intact…probably at high speed."

As for what caused the crash, "searchers believe the answer may lie at the bed of a very deep ocean," as NBC's Holt put it. The Atlantic where the crash occurred is 13,000 feet deep and consists of submarine mountain ranges. The plane's flight recorders--the so-called black boxes--will emit locator signals for 30 days yet "even once located the deep trenches of the mid-Atlantic could make recovery difficult."


Andrew Tyndall 6/4/09 7:31:50 pm

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