An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew members disappeared from radar early Thursday morning, the airline said.
The Airbus A320 most likely crashed into the sea, Ihab Raslan, a spokesman for the Egyptian civil aviation agency, told SkyNews Arabia.
He said the plane was about to enter Egyptian airspace when it disappeared from radar. The airline, however, said it had vanished 10 miles (16 kilometres) after it entered Egyptian airspace.
EgyptAir Flight 804 was lost from radar at 2:45am local time, the airline said. An inspection was underway to find the airplane, which was at a height of 37,000 feet when it disappeared, it added
EGYPTAIR A320 was at a height of 37.000ft, and disappeared after entering the Egyptian airspace with 10 miles.
— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 19, 2016
The pilot had 6,000 flight hours. Earlier, the airline said 69 people were on board.
Airbus is aware of the disappearance, but “we have no official information at this stage of the certitude of an accident,” the company’s spokesman Jacques Rocca said.
The Paris airport authority and the French civil aviation authority would not immediately comment.
An EgyptAir plane was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus in March. A man who admitted to the hijacking and is described by Cypriot authorities as “psychologically unstable” is in custody in Cyprus.
The incident renewed security concerns months after a Russian passenger plane was blown out of the sky over the Sinai Peninsula. The Russian plane crashed in Sinai on Oct 31, killing all 224 people on board.
Moscow said it was brought down by an explosive device, and a local branch of the militant Islamic State (IS) group has claimed responsibility for planting it.
In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 1990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard, US investigators filed a final report that concluded its co-pilot switched off the autopilot and pointed the Boeing 767 downward. But Egyptian officials rejected the notion of suicide altogether, insisting some mechanical reason caused the crash.
