Ex-royal, Riverdance star among plane's missing

Three young Irish women who qualified together as doctors, including a former member of the Riverdance troupe, were on board the doomed Air France plane, media reports said on Tuesday.

Jane Deasy, 27, from Dublin, Aisling Butler, 26, from Roscrea, County Tipperary, and Eithne Walls, 29, from Belfast, Northern Ireland, were returning from holiday on the Rio de Janeiro to Paris flight.

The three had met while studying medicine at Dublin's Trinity College and had qualified in 2007.

Butler's father told The Irish Examiner that when he heard about the missing plane he initially thought his daughter's flight was due in the following day but decided to check travel details in his deleted emails.

"When I opened it up, a nightmare opened up as well," he said.

"We know Aisling is gone, we are sure of that. It is just about trying to live now. I have to live for my wife and my only other daughter, Lorna."

Julian Erskine, executive producer of Riverdance, the Irish step dancing theatre show, described Eithne Walls as "bright and sparkling" and someone who made an impact on everyone she met.

"Anybody who knew her would remember her very fondly. When she wasn't dancing, she was studying. She was always on the go. She was on a mission to be a doctor. It was what she really wanted," he told RTE state radio.

She joined the Riverdance troupe in 1998 when she was 18.

"She would have travelled around the world and then she settled for a year on Broadway when we presented Riverdance in New York. Then she was back with us in the Gaiety Theatre (in Dublin) in 2004," Erskine said.

Meanwhile, details emerged of some of the five British victims of the Air France catastrophe, in which 228 people are presumed dead.

One was Alexander Bjoroy, an 11-year-old pupil at Clifton College preparatory school in Bristol. A receptionist at the school said: "We are doing all we can to support the family."

Oil worker Graham Gardner, 55, from Gourock in Scotland was named by his employers, while the wife of engineer, Arthur Coakley, from Whitby in North Yorkshire, paid tribute to her "fabulous husband".

Patricia Coakley told how her son Patrick phoned her up and asked her "What flight is Daddy on?"

"I dashed home and checked Art's itinerary on the Internet and realised... At first I didn't think it was his flight, then I realised it was," she said.

"I phoned up the company in Aberdeen and they didn't know anything about the plane crash."

Among the Brazilian victims was a member of the former royal family. Pedro Luis de Orleans e Braganca, 26, was a descendant of the family that ruled Brazil until 1889, a branch of the former Portuguese royal family. The Orleans and Braganca family considered him to be fourth in line to the throne. Pedro Luis was the oldest son of Prince Antonio and Princess Christine, the family said. He was the only member of the family on the flight, his relatives said.