The airline says Flight 804 which left Paris on its was to Cairo vanished from radar early Thursday morning shortly after entering Egyptian airspace. They continued to try to reach the pilot until 2:29 a.m. Cairo time, when the plane disappeared from the radar 7 miles southeast of the island of Crete.
Advertisement
The Egyptian Aviation minister says it’s more likely to have been brought down by an act of terror than a technical failure.
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.
Here’s the timeline of events that Greek officials have provided for when and where the plane disappeared.
“During the transfer procedure to Cairo airspace, about seven miles before the aircraft entered the Cairo airspace, Greek controllers tried to contact the pilot but he was not responding”, he said.
The Egyptian civil aviation ministry said Greek authorities had on Thursday found “floating material” and life jackets likely to be from the plane.
The Greek defence minister claims it swerved 90 degrees left and then 360 degrees right before dropping more than 20-thousand feet.
A Russian passenger plane crashed in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula last October, killing all 224 people on board.
EgyptAir operates from a hub at Cairo International Airport and is based in Heliopolisk, Egypt.
Both France and Egypt have come under attack by jihadists of the Islamic State group in the past year and Hollande promised a comprehensive investigation into the cause of the crash as suspicions swiftly focused on a bomb.
The last deadly crash involving one of the planes was in March 2015, when one of the pilots of a Germanwings flight deliberately slammed it into the French Alps, killing all 150 people aboard.
French President Francois Hollande confirmed the crash at a press conference in Paris on Thursday night (AEST time) and said “no hypothesis” should be ruled out, including terrorism.
The Egyptian military denies receiving a distress signal from an emergency locator transmitter or beacon at 4:26am, after a previous statement from EgyptAir. Earnest says the U.S.is ready to help with the investigation and that the U.S. Navy is working to deploy a P-3 Orion aircraft in the search.
The plane took off again at 0621 GMT for Tunis, a flight lasting a little more than three hours.
It also said a frigate was heading to the area and helicopters were on standby on the southern island of Karpathos for potential rescue or recovery operations.
They were expected to be joined by French teams, while the United States send a surveillance plane to help with the operation. The council includes the prime minister and the defense, foreign and interior ministers, in addition to the chiefs of the intelligence agencies.
“Our biggest concern is what’s going on in Europe, and that is something that we do have to address and deal with with all of our partners, and that’s going to have to require closer cooperation”, she said. Karpathos is between Rhodes and Crete.
Just hours after EgyptAir Flight 804 mysteriously went missing on May 18, authorities are saying there’s a “stronger” possibility that it was a terror attack rather than a technical failure.
Family members gathered at the Cairo airport were understandably distraught, and officials, including the French Ambassador to Cairo, were unable to give them any glimmer of good news that their loved ones might have survived, The Telegraph reported.
Advertisement
The Airbus A320 was part of EgyptAir’s service since November 3, 2003, with about 48,000 flight hours.
