By BuenosAiresHerald.com staff

While hypotheses are several and all remain uncertain, the only fact that can be confirmed at this point is that odds of finding survivors are nil.

After the wreckage, Air France's Director Pierre-Henry Gourgeon informed that "numerous messages were received from the missing airplane alerting that several electrical instruments were failing."

The official statement led to the first version heard: the plane had probably been struck by a bolt of lightning, but this idea is fading away as hours go by, mostly after experts around the world explained that nowadays airplanes are equipped with modern static receivers located on the tip of the wings and tail capable of absorbing high electrical shocks.

Also, and according to satellite mapping, there were turbulences and a bank of clouds, but no storms were detected in the flight-route of the Air France A-330 jet-liner at the moment it disappeared from the radars.

Structural Failure?

A structural failure is one the options specialists are investigating. An example of it could have been a major electrical problem or something as simple as a badly shut door. Airplanes' interiors are pressurized to provide the passengers with a comfortable environment and compensate the pressure difference at those heights. A badly locked door can provoke an expansive decompression in which everything that is inside is ejected outside where the pressure level is inferior.

Specialists are surprised with the incident since they all claim that the Air Bus A-330 is one of the most sophisticated airliners in the world, technologically speaking.

One thing that disturbs pilots about the A-330 model is that it only counts with two engines --instead of the four that its predecessor, model A-340, has-- which reduces to half the chances of possible manoeuvre in case of an engine related failure.

A terrorist attack?

This lead came out after experts told reporters that neither human nor mechanical reasons were enough to be pointed as the main cause of the wreckage.

It was France Defence Minister Hervé Morin who expressed that "a terrorist attack is always an option since terrorism has been the main threat for western democracies."

In spite of the Minister's words, many specialists discarded this option since no insurgent group has claimed an attack yet, and they do not see or consider Air France as a possible target for a terrorist attack. On the other hand, there are many that see a bomb as the only logical reason for such a mysterious and sudden disappearance of an airplane.

Will the black box explain it all?

The first sighting off Brazil's coast of possible wreckage from a missing Air France jet signals the start of what could be one of the most challenging operations ever mounted to retrieve the tell-tale "black box."

The box, which is in fact two separate devices containing cockpit voice recordings and instrument data, offers the best chance of finding out why the Airbus jetliner vanished in an Atlantic storm en route to Paris with 228 people on board.

Black boxes have an underwater beacon called a pinger which is activated when the recorder is immersed in water. The beacon can transmit from depths down to 14,000 feet, according to the US National Transportation Safety Board.

Even though the devices are designed to send homing signals when they hit water, locating them presents one of the most daunting recovery tasks since the exploration of the Titanic and barring good fortune, could take months, experts said.

If they are in waters as deep as some people fear, 4,000 meters (13,100 ft) or more, unmanned submersibles would be tested to their limits. Yet past disasters have led to advances in equipment which do give hope for finding out what happened.

"There is a good chance that the recorder would survive but the main problem would be finding it," said Derek Clarke, joint managing director of Aberdeen-based Divex, which designs and builds military and commercial diving equipment.