Life jackets believed to be from EgyptAir flight MS804 have been discovered floating around near the Greek island of Karpathos, Egyptian aviation officials have confirmed.
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– 1055: The plane fell 22,000 feet (6,705 metres) and swerved sharply in Egyptian airspace before it disappeared from radar screens, Greece’s defence minister Panos Kammenos says.
EgyptAir confirmed that there were 56 passengers on board, along with seven crew members and three security personnel. EgyptAir listed the nationalities of the passengers as: 30 Egyptians, 15 French, two Iraqis and one each from Sudan, Chad, Portugal, Algeria, Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
In Oct. 2015, a passenger plane went down as it left Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 people aboard, mostly Russian tourists.
A relative of a passenger on an EgyptAir flight that crashed early Thursday puts her hand on the window from inside a bus at Cairo International Airport, Egypt, Thursday, May 19, 2016.
Search and rescue teams – made up of Egyptian navy, air force and coastguard, as well as teams from Greece – were deployed to the area where radar contact was lost.
‘It then turned 90 degrees left, followed by another turn 360 degrees to the right before falling from a height of 15,000 feet.
Flight MS804, which was carrying one Briton, disappeared from radar at 1.45am this morning, around 10 miles after it had entered Egyptian airspace, sparking fears of a terror attack.
Egyptian minister Sherif Fathy said, “I don’t deny the hypothesis of a terrorist attack or something technical”.
Authorities were scouring a wide area south of the Greek island of Crete to search for wreckage, over 24 hours after the Airbus 320 lost contact.
EgyptAir vice chairman Ahmed Adel said the search and rescue operation was turning into a recovery mission. Wreckage was spotted off a Greek island, and investigations were launched to determine if the plane had been brought down by a bomb.
In a statement issued by Sisi’s office, he also ordered an investigative committee formed by the civil aviation ministry to immediately start probing the causes of the plane’s disappearance. So a lot of people are saying ‘if it was terrorism how could anything be smuggled on board?’ Questions are being asked about this aircraft, because it had earlier that day been to North Africa, in Tunisia.
All causes for the disaster are open, whether it is a major technical fault or a terrorist action or any other circumstance.
Aside from an increased security presence and scrutiny of flights bound for the USA, operations remained normal at Charles de Gaulle Airport, where MS804 originated. It is too early to speculate on the cause of this incident.
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EgyptAir hit the headlines in March when a flight from the coastal city of Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked and forced to divert to Cyprus, where the hijacker, who was described as “unstable”, demanded to see his ex-wife.
