An airplane seat, a fuel slick and pieces of white debris scattered over 5 km of open ocean marked June 2 the site in the mid-Atlantic where Air France Flight 447 plunged to its doom May 31, Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said.

Brazilian Vice President Jose Alencar is surrounded by media at Tom Jobim Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 1 after visiting relatives of passengers aboard Air France Flight 447. AP PHOTO

Brazilian military pilots spotted the wreckage in the ocean 640 km northeast of the Fernando de Noronha archipelago off Brazil's northeast coast. The plane carrying 228 people vanished about four hours into its flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris.

"I can confirm that the 5 km of debris are those of the Air France plane," Jobim said June 2 in Rio, adding that no bodies had been found and there was no sign of life.

The effort to recover the debris and locate the all-important black box recorders, which emit signals for only 30 days, is expected to be exceedingly challenging.

"We are in a race against the clock in extremely difficult weather conditions and in a zone where depths reach up to 7,000 meters," French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told lawmakers in the National Assembly in Paris on June 2.

The cause of the crash will not be known until the black boxes are recovered — which could take days or weeks. But weather and aviation experts are focusing on the possibility of a collision with a brutal storm.

"The airplane was flying at 500 mph (800 kph) northeast and the air is coming at them at 100 mph (160 kph)," said AccuWeather.com senior meteorologist Henry Margusity. "That probably started the process that ended up in some catastrophic failure of the airplane."