DEBRIS including plane seats has been found by search teams looking for the disappeared Air France passenger jet.

The items have reportedly been spotted 400 miles north east of Brazil.

North Yorkshire father-of-three Arthur Coakley is feared to be one of the 228 people on board the plane.

Mr Coakley's wife, Patricia, of Sandsend, near Whitby, North Yorkshire, today broke down in tears as she described the devastating impact that the loss of the 61-year-old had had on their family.

She said: "He was fabulous, he really was. You can ask anybody about Art, they will all tell you great. He had a very dry sense of humour.

"We met and married within three months, we have been married 34 years."

Mrs Coakley said they had planned to buy a property in Corfu and were also saving up to buy a yacht but she added: "He's not going to come back. Yesterday I was really optimistic, today maybe more realistic. I would love him to come back."

She said the impact on their three children, Dominic, 31, Patrick, 29, and daughter Mise, 25, had been devastating.

She added: "They are distraught. They absolutely idolised and worshipped their father.

"He worked so hard for his family, that's all he wanted, to retire. It's not going to happen, is it?"

Mr Coakley was a structural engineer working for PDMS, an Aberdeen-based oil company, and was helping with a survey in Brazil.

It emerged yesterday that he was not even supposed to be on the missing Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Business partner Ken Pearce revealed Mr Coakley – one of five Britons aboard – was due to travel on the previous flight, but that had been full.

Everyone on the Airbus A330, including a baby and seven children, are feared dead after it ran into stormy weather with strong turbulence about four hours into the flight. About 15 minutes later, an automatic message was received from the plane indicating a failure in the electrical circuit.

Air France said flight AF447 could have been struck by lightning.

Mr Coakley had been involved in carrying out survey work on an oil rig and had been in Brazil for four weeks.

“His return date has been cancelled twice, but he wasn’t supposed to be on this flight,” his wife said.

She said that their son, who works in Leeds for a film company, had phoned her while she was visiting her mother to ask which flight his father was on.

“I said ‘I don’t know’. So I came home, checked it out, and realised it was Art’s.”

The couple’s other son returned home as soon as he received the news and their daughter was last night flying back from the south of France. Mrs Coakley last spoke to her husband shortly before the flight took off on Sunday evening.

“He had just checked in his luggage and was waiting for his flight to be called.

“He phoned every day and emailed several times a day."

The flight left Rio at 11.03pm GMT on Sunday and had been due to arrive at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport at about 10.15am GMT yesterday.

Aviation experts said turbulence and electrical problems were unlikely to bring down a large passenger plane, while aircraft were well protected against lightning strikes. But they pointed to turbulence as the cause of a BOAC (later British Airways) crash in Japan in 1966 and to an electrical problem leading to a catastrophic fire which resulted in a Swissair plane going down off Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1998, with the loss of 229 lives.

David Learmount, operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine, said: “An event like this is the kind the aviation world hoped it would not see again, because it involves a worldclass carrier flying the latest generation of airliner, and it occurred en route, not during take-off or landing in difficult weather.

“It’s a chilling reminder that nothing is impossible, however unthinkable.”

French president Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his concern about the incident and French ministers travelled to Charles de Gaulle airport.

Air France expressed its “deepest sympathy” to the relatives and friends of the 216 passengers and 12 crew and was providing support for them, including counselling with physicians and psychologists at Charles de Gaulle and Rio airports.

Manufacturer Airbus, which had delivered the plane to Air France in April 2005, also expressed sympathy for all those involved.

Air France said: “The aircraft hit a zone of stormy weather with strong turbulence at 2am (3am GMT) this morning. An automatic message was received from the aircraft at 2.14am (3.14am GMT) indicating a failure in the electric circuit a long way from the coast.

“The Brazilian, African, Spanish and French air traffic control centres all tried to make contact with flight AF447, but to no avail. The French military air traffic control centre tried to detect the aircraft, but did not succeed.”

The 216 passengers comprised 126 men, 82 women, seven children and one baby.

The 12 flight crew members were made up of three pilots and nine flight attendants.

The plane’s captain had a record of 11,000 flight hours and had already flown 1,700 hours on Airbus A330/A340s.

Of the two first officers (copilots), one had flown 3,000 flight hours (800 on the Airbus A330/A340) and the other 6,600 (2,600 on the A330/A340).

The aircraft was powered by General Electric CF6-80E engines. The aircraft went into service on April 18 2005 and had totalled 18,870 flight hours.

Its last maintenance check in the hangar took place on April 16 this year.

Aviation safety experts said extreme turbulence had been the probable cause of the 1966 BOAC disaster in which a Boeing 707 had crashed near Mount Fuji having taken off from Tokyo in a disaster that killed all 113 passengers and 11 crew.

In the Swissair incident in 1998 the pilots had reported a burning smell and were unaware that an electrical problem had resulted in a fire that wrecked all the plane’s systems, with all contact lost within minutes.