Routine Disappearance of Airbus Upgraded to Tragedy After British Names Found on Manifest

The unremarkable disappearance of an AirFrance flight from Brazil to Paris turned into a tragedy of unimaginable proportions today, when it was discovered that five Britons did not know any better than to travel on a French airliner operated by a French carrier.

Another 223 people are missing, presumed dead, after the flying deathtrap vanished in mid-Atlantic - although most of them are likely to be French, and so presumably knew the risks.

Search aircraft are patrolling the vast ocean in the somewhat unlikely hope of spotting the Airbus A330 floating happily on the waves, with the passengers and crew enjoying a picnic on the wings as they wait to be picked up.

Realistically, however, all they are likely to see are a few seat cushions and plastic panels, which may give some indication of where the doomed plane's black boxes are lying on the ocean floor. The discovery of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder would give vital clues about what went catastrophically wrong with Flight AF447, if they were examined by competent air accident investigators.

However, as the carrier, aeroplane and crew were all French, it is widely expected that the crash will be blamed on the weather, terrorist birds or those pesky aliens from the Bermuda Triangle, rather than any inherent design faults in French-assembled Airbuses - whose computer systems have occasionally been known to land aircraft in forests or attempt to loop the loop over Paris.

Non-French experts suggested that an automated radio message from the aircraft, reporting an electrical failure, may not necessarily mean that the plane had been brought down by lightning.

"Funnily enough, we thought of that problem several decades ago," said one non-French aircraft designer. "Although it may be convenient for the French government to try to blame random mischance, it's actually fairly common for airliners to be struck by lightning and carry on flying. It's not as if they're earthed, is it?"

"If and when the black boxes are brought to the surface and properly analysed - by which I mean by a British or American team of properly-trained experts with no political agenda, whose only concern is to prevent the same kind of accident from ever happening again - I wouldn't be surprised if the circuit failure wasn't caused by the frenzied cockpit crew desperately ripping out the wiring from behind the instrument panel in a desperate attempt to prevent the computer from trying to fly the aircraft to the moon," he added. "Unfortunately, however, it looks like the French will be handling this one themselves."

"Hope is not yet lost," a sombre President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters in Paris. "We are investigating the possibility that there may be a plucky band of good-looking survivors on a mysterious, peripatetic island, struggling to outwit its highly-organised, malevolent occupants. It may be a bit far-fetched, I grant you - but no more so than the idea that France may one day place the safety of air travellers above national prestige. Vive la France!"