An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew members is believed to have crashed.
The Airbus A320 was flying at 37,000ft (11,300m) when it lost contact over the eastern Mediterranean. An official said the plane disappeared from radar at 2:45am Cairo time (12:45am GMT), the BBC reports.
A Civil Aviation Ministry statement said the ‘possibility that the plane crashed has been confirmed’, hours after Flight MS804 was due to land in Cairo, according to The Independent. A search for debris is underway.
The Airbus A320 was about three hours and 40 minutes into the four-hour journey, over the Mediterranean Sea, when it lost contact.
The airline said the passengers on board included 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, one Briton, one Canadian, as well as people from Algeria, Belgium, Sudan, Chad and Portugal.
There was one child and two infants on board.
The aircraft had left Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:09pm local time on Wednesday (9:09 GMT) and was scheduled to arrive in the Egyptian capital soon after 3:00am local time on Thursday.
Families of the passengers are being kept inside the EgyptAir in-flight service building at Cairo International airport. EgyptAir says a number of doctors and translators are being provided. Medics and psychologists are on standby to help families at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.
Egyptian media initially reported that no distress call was made, but the airline later tweeted that official sources said a signal was received from the plane by the armed forces at 4:26am – about two hours after the last confirmed radar contact.
Now, Egypt’s military said in a statement no such signal was received, BBC reports.
Aviation analyst Alex Macheras told the BBC that Airbus A320s are regularly used for short-haul flights and have ‘an amazing safety record’. France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls said: “no theory can be ruled out on the cause of this disappearance”.
Egypt’s Prime Minister Sherif Ismail has said there are no confirmed reports so far on the current situation of the EgyptAir plane, according to BBC Monitoring.
Earlier reports by The Telegraph stated that a defence 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 the island of Karpathos.
Greek airport sources now say the crash site is off the Greek island of Karpathos.
There is currently a search underway.
More information to follow.
