Inital reports indicate that there are 59 passengers and 10 crew members. Earlier, the airline said 69 people were on board.
Advertisement
National carrier EgyptAir said the plane was traveling at a height of 37,000 feet and vanished 10 miles after entering Egyptian airspace. It was expected to arrive in Cairo by 3am on Thursday. The captain had 6,000-plus flying hours and the first officer had 4,000-plus hours, he said.
“We are at the disposition of the Egyptian authorities with our military capacities, with our planes, our boats to help in the search for this plane”, he said.
Hollande spoke with Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on the phone and agreed to “closely cooperate to establish as soon as possible the circumstances” surrounding the incident, according to a statement issued in Paris.
Flight MS804 departed the French capital at 11.09pm (CEST) before vanishing.
Those on board, according to EgyptAir, included 15 French passengers, 30 Egyptians, two Iraqis, one Briton, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi, one Sudanese, one Chadian, one Portuguese, one Belgian, one Algerian and one Canadian.
Greek civil aviation authorities said the jet disappeared off its radar two minutes after leaving its airspace.
ISIS later posted in their Dabiq magazine a photo of the soda-can bomb they said took down the plane.
France’s aviation authority could not immediately be reached for comment.
A crisis centre offering support to the families with loved ones on board has been set up at Cairo International Airport.
The Airbus A320 is a widely used twin-engine, single-aisle plane that operates on short and medium-haul routes.
But the industry was badly hit following the downing of a Russian jet a year ago, the hijacking of an EgyptAir jet in March, the ongoing Islamist insurgency and a string of bomb attacks in the country.
An Airbus A321 operated by Russia’s Metrojet crashed in the Sinai in October 2015, killing all 224 people on board.
Advertisement
In March, an EgyptAir plane flying from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked and forced to land in Cyprus by a man with what authorities said was a fake suicide belt. Russian Federation and Western governments have said the plane was most likely brought down by a bomb, and the Islamic State militant group said it had smuggled an explosive on board.
