An EgyptAir flight on its way to Cairo from Paris disappeared from radar Wednesday night, according to a tweet from the airline.
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Panos Kammeno, Greek Defence Minister, has stated that the plane made a “sharp turn and descent” before it dispappeared from the radar. “It just lost contact and we lost it on the radar of the air traffic controllers”.
That stance drew criticism from global governments, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, for Egypt’s failure to join others in acknowledging it had likely been a terrorist attack.
He said the distress signal could have come from another vessel in the Mediterranean.
The debris of that plane also remained scattered for weeks over miles of desert in the Sinai Peninsula as Egyptian officials tried to secure the crash zone, raising fears that evidence could be compromised.
EgyptAir said on Twitter that the pilot has 6,275 of flying hours, including 2,101 flying hours on the Airbus 320.
The Hellenic National Defense General Staff said one frigate is also heading to the area where the plane disappeared and is about 100 nautical miles or 4 hours away at this time.
EgyptAir plane crashed off Greek island of Karpathos in Egyptian airspace: Greek airport source, quoted by wires.
Konstantinos Lintzerakos, director of Greece Civil Aviation Authority, gave a roughly similar account to that given by EgyptAir.
The Paris prosecutor’s office says its accident department had opened an investigation into the crash.
The EgyptAir Flight 804 which vanished from dadar on its way from Paris to Cairo with 66 people aboard was an Airbus A320.
An EgyptAir plane was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus in March.
But Egypt’s military subsequently said that no such signal had been received.
– The Egyptian navy is conducting search and rescue operations with help from Greece.
It has been reported that an EgyptAir flight travelling between Paris and Ciaro has gone missing on path.
Aviation analyst Alex Macheras told the BBC that Airbus A320s were regularly used for short-haul budget flights and had “an wonderful safety record”.
In October past year, 224 people were killed when a Russian aircraft crashed over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula minutes after it took off from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
EgyptAir flight 804’s 56 passengers included one child and two infants, the airline said.
Aviation officials said the plane had crashed and a search was under way.
A search and rescue operation was under way Thursday after an EgyptAir flight with 69 people on board vanished from radar en route from Paris to Cairo, the airline said.
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The airline’s media center said it will provide more information as it becomes available. By the end of February 2015 almost 6,200 A320 Family aircraft were in operation worldwide.
