Passenger jet en route to Cairo from Paris veered sharply before sudden plunge
Wreckage of the EgyptAir passenger jet that disappeared on Thursday morning has been found during a military search operation in the eastern Mediterranean, the airline said on Friday.
“The Egyptian armed forces found in the first hours of this morning the remains of wreckage and belongings from [flight] MS804 at 295 kilometres from the Alexandria shoreline,” EgyptAir said in a statement.
The Airbus A320 crashed after passing over Greek islands en route to Cairo from Paris with 66 people on board. French and Egyptian authorities have not ruled out the possibility that it was brought down by an act of terrorism.
The discovery of debris from the aircraft followed a day of confusion on Thursday, when EgyptAir at one point said wreckage had been found off the coast of Crete but was later forced to withdraw its statement.
Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s aviation minister, said on Thursday that the possibility of a terrorist attack was higher than technical failure, but added: “It is still speculations and assumptions.”
Contrary to some reports, a US official said that, so far, there was no evidence in satellite imagery of an explosion.
US intelligence services are helping French and Egyptians authorities analyse the list of 56 passengers for possible terrorist connections.
However, Josh Earnest, White House spokesman, said on Thursday evening: “At this time we do not yet know definitively what caused the disappearance of Flight 804.”
Panos Kammenos, Greek defence minister, said radar showed the aircraft veered sharply shortly after leaving Greek-controlled airspace. The jet plunged from 37,000 feet to 10,000 feet where it dropped off the radar before crashing into the sea between Karpathos and the Egyptian coast.
The state-owned airline said there were 30 Egyptian nationals among the passengers, along with 15 French and two Iraqi, and one each from the UK, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Chad, Portugal, Algeria and Canada. The Canadian government later said that two Canadian citizens had been on board.
“We have a duty to know everything about what happened. No hypothesis is preferred, no hypothesis is being ruled out,” said François Hollande, French president. Asked if terrorism could be to blame for the disappearance, Sherif Ismail, Egypt’s prime minister, said his country was not excluding any cause at this stage.
MS804 left Charles de Gaulle airport at 11.09pm local time on Wednesday and disappeared off radar at about 2.30am Cairo time, 10 miles inside Egyptian airspace.
Konstantinos Lintzerakos, director of Greece’s Civil Aviation Authority, said controllers tried to contact the pilot 10 miles before the plane left the Greek Flight Information Region. The pilot did not respond, he said, and they tried to make contact for 10 minutes. Greek and Egyptian authorities said they had received no distress call from the flight crew.
The lack of radio contact is likely to be of particular significance to investigators, suggesting the crew was grappling with an emergency, incapacitated or prevented from answering before the aircraft abruptly changed course and crashed.
Weather conditions at the time of the crash were good, meaning investigators are likely to focus on the possibility that it was caused by a deliberate act or a catastrophic mechanical failure.
This incident is the second this year for EgyptAir after a flight from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked in March. It later landed safely in Cyprus and no one was hurt.
Like all modern jets, the A320 has a good safety record. Airbus said the aircraft was delivered to EgyptAir in November 2003. The aircraft had accumulated about 48,000 flight hours and was powered by engines made by IAE, a joint venture between Pratt & Whitney of the US, Germany’s MTU and three Japanese companies.
Reporting by Adam Thomson and Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in Paris, Heba Saleh in Cairo, Kerin Hope in Athens, Mark Odell and Peggy Hollinger in the UK, Robert Wright in New York, Geoff Dyer in Washington and Hudson Lockett in Hong Kong
Airline disasters and industry safety record
Some of the most serious aviation disasters of recent years have been the result of deliberate acts.
In October last year, 224 people died over Egypt’s Sinai desert when a bomb brought down an A321 operated by Russia’s Metrojet shortly after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh airport. The Egyptian branch of Isis, the Islamist group, has claimed responsibility.
In July 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down, apparently by pro-Russia rebels in Ukraine, killing 283 passengers and 15 crew.
In March 2015, an A320 operated by Germanwings, part of Lufthansa, crashed into the Alps in France, in a suicide by the co-pilot.
A crash in December 2014 of an A320 operated by AirAsia in a storm over the Java Sea, which killed 162 people, was later traced to a fault with the aircraft’s rudder. The crew had mishandled the fault.
In March 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, carrying 239 people, disappeared from radar before crashing somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. The cause of the disappearance has not been explained.
The Aviation Safety Network, which tracks every aviation incident, said fatal airliner incidents were at a record low in 2015. A total of 16 fatal crashes were recorded, resulting in 560 deaths. Given the expected worldwide air traffic of 34m flights, the accident rate was one fatal passenger flight accident per 4.9m flights.
For incidents believed to have been caused by sabotage, shoot-downs or pilot suicide only three previous years — 1988, 1983 and 1985 — have experienced a higher death toll.
In 2014, 21 fatal crashes were recorded — the lowest since 1946 — but the number of fatalities was high given that several incidents involved large jets, including MH370.
