EgyptAir flight MS804: plane vanishes with 66 people aboard

An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo vanished from radar screens yesterday, with terrorism not ruled out.

A relative of the victims of the EgyptAir flight 804 reacts as she makes a phone call at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside of Paris.

An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board vanished from radar screens ­yesterday with reports of a flame in the sky over the Mediterranean.

Terrorism has not been ruled out as the cause of the crash of flight MS804, which plunged into the Mediterranean 130 nautical miles from the Greek island of ­Karp­athos, near Crete.

AS IT HAPPENED: How yesterday unfolded

Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathi said last night the possibility of a terror attack as the cause of the crash of the Airbus A320 was “stronger” than technical failure.

Earlier Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said it was too early to say whether a technical problem or a terrorist attack caused the crash.

“We cannot rule anything out,” Mr Ismail said at Cairo airport.

MS804 lost contact with air traffic control 20 minutes before it was due to land at Cairo airport in the early hours of the morning.

EgyptAir said MS804 vanished 16km after it entered Egyptian ­airspace, about 280km off Egypt’s coastline north of Alexandria.

The airliner fell 22,000 feet and swerved sharply before it disappeared from radar screens, Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said. “The plane carried out a 90-degree turn to the left and a 360-degree turn to the right, falling from 37,000 to 15,000 feet and the signal was lost at around 10,000 feet,” Mr Kammenos said.

 

Egypt’s state-run newspaper Al-Ahram quoted an airport ­official as saying the pilot did not send a distress call.

“I saw a flame in the sky,” a Mediterranean merchant ship captain reported to the Greek ­defence ministry.

EgyptAir vice-chairman Ehab Mohy El-Deen told The New York Times there had been no SOS or loss of altitude. “They just ­vanished,’’ Mr El-Deen said.

Egyptian officials said the plane had crashed and Greek officials said search vessels had detected debris about 80km from MS804’s last reported location.

Twenty-six foreigners were among the 56 passengers, including 15 French citizens, a Briton and a Canadian, EgyptAir said.

The A320 was still in the cruise phase of the flight at 37,000 feet, having just moved from Greek airspace into Egyptian ­airspace when all contact with the plane was lost at 2.45am (10.45am AEST).

Greece Civil Aviation Authority director Konstantinos Lintzerakos said air traffic controllers had been in contact with the pilot, who reported no problems as the aircraft cruised at 830km/h.

According to flight-tracking website Flightradar24, MS804 was flying a course consistent with other flights bound for Cairo from Western Europe. Data from Flightradar24 shows the plane’s altitude and speed did not change significantly in the minutes leading up to its ­disappearance from radar. One aviation expert said that given the sudden disappearance of the aircraft from radar, it was “highly unlikely” a mechanical failure was at fault. Only a sudden, catastrophic failure that resulted in a depressurisation incident would have prohibited the pilot from sending out a distress call.

French President Francois Hollande has been in contact with Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the two have pledged to work together to investigate the crash.

Mr Hollande held an emergency meeting at the Elysee Palace.

France is still in a state of emergency after the devastating November Paris attacks, and security at all French airports is extremely tight.

In Cairo, Mr el-Sisi convened an emergency meeting of ­the National Security Council, the country’s highest security body.

Airbus was aware of the disappearance, but “we have no official information at this stage of the certitude of an accident”, the company’s spokesman Jacques Rocca said.

Military and government officials have been scouring all military activity in the area, although officials had ruled out a land-launched missile attack because the flight was 280km from the coast, unlike Malaysian Airlines MH17 which was shot out of the sky by pro-Russian rebels at 33,000 feet over Ukraine in July 2014, killing 298 people, including 38 Australians.

MS804, which had left Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport at 11.09pm, had earlier travelled to Tunisia and Eritrea, and the passenger list reflected this.

There were 12 different nationalities on board, which was only a third full with 56 passengers and 10 crew.

EgyptAir said there were 30 Egyptians, 15 French, two Iraqis and one each from Britain, Canada, Portugal, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Chad and Algeria. Two of the passengers were babies and one was an older child. The 10-strong crew included three security officials.

The A320 is one of the most common aircraft used across Europe.

Tourism to Egypt plummeted after a bomb was smuggled on board at Sharm El-Sheikh airport by Islamic State sympathisers, bringing down a Russian Metrojet plane over the Sinai last October, killing 224 people. Then in March, an EgyptAir plane from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked and forced to land in Cyrpus by a man who had worn a fake suicide belt.