“We can not rule anything out”, he told reporters at Cairo airport.
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The sudden and violent manner of the aircraft’s descent prompted Egyptian officials to suggest that a terrorist act rather than a technical fault may have been responsible, but the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said yesterday that there had been “absolutely no indication” as to why the plane came down.
ACARS is used to routinely download flight data to the airline operating the aircraft.
No survivors have been found, but searchers in the Mediterranean Sea located debris on Friday, including suitcases and human remains.
Smoke and fire broke out on board EgyptAir flight MS804 minutes before the plane plunged off radar screens during the early hours of Thursday morning.
Later the European Space Agency said one of its satellites had on Thursday spotted an oil slick about 40 kilometres southeast of the plane’s last known location.
But the mystery remained over why the Airbus A320 – which had been cruising normally in clear skies on a nighttime flight from Paris to Cairo early Thursday – suddenly lurched left, then right, and plummeted from 38,000 feet into the sea, never issuing a distress signal. Those messages showed that smoke was detected in the plan’s lavatory near the cockpit, according to the report.
The US officials said they could not confirm the authenticity the data, however, and EgyptAir officials could not be reached for immediate comment.
Finding the flight recorders will also likely take some time as the water is 8,000 to 10,000 feet deep where the jet crashed during the early hours of Thursday.
Helal was taking a vacation when the Cairo-bound plane went down Thursday south of the Greek island of Crete.
The tragedy added grief to a sense of disbelief over a recent string of disasters, including the Russian airliner that was brought down shortly after it left the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in October, dealing a crippling blow to the country’s tourism.
The plane vanished just as it was moving from Greek to Egyptian airspace control.
The plane swerved wildly before going off the radar, said Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, according to the wire service.
Officials from a number of U.S. agencies told Reuters that a USA review of satellite imagery so far had not produced any signs of an explosion.
While most governments were cautious about jumping to conclusions, US Republican candidate for president Donald Trump tweeted swiftly after the plane’s disappearance: “Looks like yet another terrorist attack”.
“At this point, we still can’t corroborate the theory that terrorism brought it down or there was some structural problem with the plane”, Schiff told CNN.
“We’re looking at all possibilities, but none is being favoured over the others”, he said.
“But the reality is, we don’t have hard evidence that this was terrorism yet”. The last deadly crash involving the plane was Germanwings Flight 9525, in which all 150 onboard died when one of the pilots intentionally crashed it in the French Alps.
“He comes from a pilot family; his uncle was a high-ranking pilot at EgyptAir and his cousin is also a pilot”, Gameel said.
A Facebook page that appeared to be Shouqair’s included criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood, repostings of articles supporting President Sisi and pictures of Shouqair wearing aviator sunglasses. He vowed to continue the investigation and “to establish the truth and the causes of the crash”.
The news follows reports from Egyptian State Media that some of the passenger’s possessions as well as debris had been found about 290km off the coast of Alexandria.
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French investigators were due to meet their Egyptian counterparts in Cairo, while a French patrol boat carrying equipment capable of tracking the plane’s black boxes was expected on Sunday or Monday. They included 30 Egyptian and 15 French nationals, along with citizens of 10 other countries. The plane had made scheduled flights to Tunisia and Eritrea on Wednesday before arriving in Paris from Cairo.
