Aboard were 56 passengers and 10 cabin crew members and security officers.
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EgyptAir said this evening the plane’s wreckage had been discovered near Karpathos Island, although that was later disputed by Greek authorities.
Wreckage has been found in the search for a missing EgyptAir flight which disappeared en route to Cairo from Paris amid fears that it was brought down by a terror attack.
Greek state television said aircraft debris had been found in the sea during a search for the missing Airbus A320.
Flight MS804 left Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris at 23:09 local time on Wednesday (21:09 GMT) and was scheduled to arrive in the Egyptian capital soon after 03:15 local time on Thursday.
“But if you analyze this situation properly, the possibility of having a different action aboard, of having a terror attack, is higher than having a technical problem”, Fathi said.
But just ahead of the handover to Cairo airspace, calls to the plane went unanswered, before it dropped off radars shortly after exiting Greek airspace, Kostas Litzerakis, the head of Greece’s civil aviation department, told Reuters.
When they attempted to contact the pilots again 10 miles before the plane left Greek airspace, they didn’t get a response despite trying for one and a half minutes.
Egyptian security officials said they were running background checks on the passengers to see if any had links to extremists.
In Cairo’s airport, dozens of relatives paced anxiously in a building set aside for families. Gen. Robert Latiff, an expert on aerospace systems at the University of Notre Dame, said that while it is too early to tell for certain, a structural failure aboard the plane is “vanishingly improbable”.
There were also two Iraqis on board, as well as others from Britain, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Chad, Portugal, Algeria and Canada.
The cause behind the disappearance of EgyptAir 804 is more likely to be terrorism than a technical issue, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy said at a Cairo press conference Thursday.
Flight MS804 was traveling from Paris to Cairo at about 37,000 feet when it suddenly swerved, dove and faded off the radar.
For now, however, finding the airplane and any possible survivors is the priority, authorities said.
The U.S. Navy is providing a P-3 Orion aircraft to help in the search effort, according to Lt. Col. David Westover of the U.S. European Command.
It tweeted that the pilot had logged 6,275 flying hours, including 2,101 hours on the A320, and the co-pilot had logged 2,766 hours. After plunging from 37,000 feet to 15,000, it vanished from Greek radar screens.
The weather was clear and calm when the plane crossed over the Mediterranean, CNN meteorologist Pedram Javaheri said.
The region is no stranger to air disasters.
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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. The Russian plane crashed in Sinai on October 31, killing all 224 people on board.
