An airplane seat, a life jacket, metallic debris and signs of fuel were found in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday by Brazilian military pilots searching for a missing Air France airliner.

The debris was spotted from the air about 410 miles north of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, roughly along the path that the jet was taking before it disappeared with 228 people on board, said Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral.

There were no signs of life in two sightings of separate debris areas about 35 miles apart.

“The locations where the objects were found are towards the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted,” Amaral said. “That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis.”

Amaral said authorities would not be able to confirm that the debris is from the plane until they can retrieve some of it from the ocean for identification. Brazilian military ships are not expected to arrive at the area until Wednesday.

The discovery came more than 24 hours after the jet bound from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went missing, with all feared dead.

French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said bad weather made the search difficult Tuesday, with heavy clouds forcing search planes to fly very low over the water, limiting their line of sight.

“For the time being we can’t find anything,” he said. “There are a lot of squalls, a lot of storms.”

Rescuers were still scanning a vast sweep of ocean extending from far off northeastern Brazil to waters off West Africa. The 4-year-old Airbus A330 was last heard from at 10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday.

The area covers a steep underwater mountain range “as big as the Andes,” Prazuck said, which will make further exploration and recovery operations extremely difficult.

France’s junior minister for transport, Dominique Bussereau, predicted a “very long investigation; it could be several days, several weeks, or several months.”

President Barack Obama told French television stations the United States was ready to do everything necessary to find out what happened to the missing plane. France has sought U.S. satellite help to find the wreckage.

(Source: WCBSTV)