EgyptAir Flight Carrying 66 People Disappears From Radar
Michael Sohn / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Search and rescue teams responded early Thursday after an EgyptAir flight carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew members disappeared from radar over the Mediterranean Sea.
Flight MS804 was traveling from Paris' Charles De Gaulle Airport to Cairo when it lost communication with radar at 2:30 a.m. Egypt time, about 10 miles after it entered Egyptian airspace, according to the airline.
The aircraft lost contact about 280 kilometers, or about 174 miles, off the Egyptian coast, the airline said. The plane, an Airbus A320, was scheduled to land by 3:15 a.m. local time; several hours later, it remained unaccounted for.
EgyptAir Vice Chairman Ahmed Adel said on CNN there was “no distress call" from the plane, they "just lost contact." Greek air traffic controllers also told Egyptian authorities they had lost contact with the plane.
“They did not radio for help or lose altitude. They just vanished,” Ehab Mohy el-Deen, the head of Egypt’s air navigation authority, told the New York Times.
EgyptAir later said in a statement Thursday morning that a distress signal was picked up from plane's "emergency device" just before 4:30 a.m. local time — two hours after the aircraft disappeared from radar.
EgyptAir in its initial reports had said 69 people were on board. The number was later revised to account for 56 passengers — including two infants and one child — three security personnel, five cabin crew members, and two cockpit crew.
The airline released an initial passenger manifest Thursday morning by nationality: 15 French, 30 Egyptian, one British, one Belgian, two Iraqis, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi, one Sudanese, one Chadians, one Portuguese, one Algerian, one Canadian.
The captain of the missing plane has more than 6,000 hours of flight experience, and the first officer has more than 4,000 hours, EgyptAir said. The plane was manufactured in 2003.
Online flight radar trackers showed the plane last reported its location over the waters of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The plane had been flying for about three hours and 40 minutes and last reported an altitude of 37,000 feet.
The airline initially said the flight disappeared about 10 minutes outside of Egyptian airspace; it later corrected that the plane had, in fact, entered Egyptian territory. Weather conditions over the Mediterranean appeared to be clear at the time the plane dropped off the radar.
Search and rescue teams as well as other appropriate authorities were notified of the flight's disappearance and were responding to an area about 30 to 40 miles off the coast of Egypt, but the airline later said the plane lost contact much farther off the coast.
In October, a Russian Metrojet plane crashed shortly after takeoff in Egypt's Sinai peninsula. All 224 people on board were killed.