The EgyptAir passenger jet, an Airbus A320, was travelling from Paris to Cairo at an altitude of 37,000 feet when it vanished from radar shortly after entering Egyptian airspace.
Carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two infants, and 10 crew members, the plane then plunged into the Mediterranean Sea. Thirty of the passengers were Egyptian, 15 of them French, and the remainder included people from Chad, Sudan and Algeria.
"The last contact we had with the plane control tower is 2:30 in the morning and after that the plane disappeared from radar at about 2:50 am," Egypt's Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy said at a news conference in Cairo.
Objects, including two life jackets as well as pieces of plastic, were found in the sea 370 km south of Crete after the plane went missing. But EgyptAir Vice President Ahmed Adel said the debris was not from Flight MS804, retracting an earlier statement.
Families of the passengers flocked to Cairo's main airport seeking answers. But from the start, the outlook was bleak.
There had been no warning from the crew that anything was wrong. Greek aviation officials said the plane made two sharp turns before plunging into the sea.
The plane crash has fueled concerns that terrorists have struck yet again. Both Egypt and France have been hit before.
"It's not far off to be a terrorist attack. The plane departed from Charles De Gaulle airport, and France is facing terrorism and was hit by huge terrorist attacks months ago when more than 200 people were killed. So why couldn't it be a terrorist or an employee in the airport placing a bomb on the flight with a timer and blowing up the airplane in the air after 2 hours of flight?" said Samy Abdel Rady, the deputy editor-in-chief of Watan Paper.
A defense ministry source said authorities were also investigating an account from the captain of a merchant ship who reported a ”flame in the sky” about 130 nautical miles south of Karpathos.
Greece deployed aircraft and a frigate to search for the missing Airbus while Egypt said it would lead the investigation that France would participate in. Other countries that have offered to help include Britain and the United States.
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
