EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo disappears from radar

There were 59 passengers and 10 crew aboard, according to the airline.

Egyptian search teams combed the Mediterranean for signs of an EgyptAir flight with 66 people on board that vanished from radar en route from Paris to Cairo on Thursday, the airline said.

There were 56 passengers, seven crew members and three security men on board the Airbus A320, EgyptAir said, adding that the passengers included a boy and two babies.

The Egyptian military said it had deployed search aircraft and naval vessels to locate the plane, in cooperation with Greece.

A tweet on the airline’s official account said flight MS804 left Paris at 11:09 pm local time (2109 GMT), “heading to Cairo (and) has disappeared from radar”.

The plane was carrying 30 Egyptian and 15 French passengers, as well as a Briton and a Canadian, the airline said.

An Algerian, a Belgian, a Chadian, two Iraqis, a Kuwaiti, a Portuguese, a Saudi and a Sudanese were also on board the flight, EgyptAir said in a statement.

LOST CONTACT IN EGYPTIAN AIRSPACE

Further tweets in Arabic said contact was lost at 2:45 am Cairo time (0045 GMT), when the plane was just inside Egyptian airspace and at an altitude of 37,000 feet (11,000 metres).

“EGYPTAIR has contacted the concerned authorities and bodies and inspection is underway through the rescue teams,” another tweet in English said.

The airline said in a statement that Egyptian military search and rescue teams were combing the area where the jet might have gone down.

Ahmed Abdel, the vice-chairman of EgyptAir holding company, told CNN that search and rescue teams were now at the scene.

“Daylight has just broken around an hour ago, so we should get some information within the next hour,” he told the channel at around 0400 GMT.

There were no distress calls from the plane, he added.

The flight from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Cairo normally takes just over four hours and the plane was due to arrive at 3:05 am local time.

NO THEORY CAN BE RULED OUT

France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Thursday “no theory can be ruled out” in the missing flight.

“No theory can be ruled out on the cause of this disappearance,” said Valls, speaking after the plane vanished from radar over the Mediterranean with 66 people on board.

French President Francois Hollande and his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi have “agreed to cooperate closely” to establish the circumstances of the disappearance as soon as possible, Paris said.

The Egyptian military said it had deployed search aircraft and naval vessels to scour the Mediterranean for signs of the missing Airbus A320.

An EgyptAir official said the search was focused on an area of sea north of the Egyptian coast, without providing a precise location.

FLIGHT TRACKER

The Flightradar24 website said MS804 is an Airbus A320-232, and was delivered to the airline in 2003.

The website is a flight tracker that shows live air traffic from around the world.

EgyptAir hit the headlines in March when a flight from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked and forced to divert to Cyprus, where the “unstable” hijacker demanded to see his ex-wife.

In October, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for bombing a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board.

The disappearance of the jet on Thursday comes more than two years after the start of one of the most enduring mysteries in aviation history.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board, mostly Chinese and Malaysians.

Authorities believe the Boeing 777 detoured to the remote southern Indian Ocean and then plunged into the water.

The costly, painstaking search for a crash site has yet to yield results, but five pieces of debris have been identified as either definitely or probably from the jet, all found thousands of kilometres (miles) from the search zone, likely swept there by ocean currents.

Theories to explain the disappearance include a possible mechanical or structural failure, a hijacking or terror plot, or rogue pilot action.