EgyptAir Flight MS804, en route to Cairo, disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea Thursday morning, crashing about three hours after it took off from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport.
The Egyptian military has confirmed search and rescue teams have found debris from the aircraft and some the personal belongings of its passengers north of Alexandria, Egypt. While officials still have not confirmed the cause of the crash, Egypt’s aviation minister said the possibility of a terrorist attack is “stronger” than that of a mechanical failure.
EgyptAir’s vice president told CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour that “all maintenance checks on the plane had been done on time,” and the plane was “fine and healthy” at take off.
It was a sudden disappearance 10 miles into Egyptian airspace — Greek air traffic controllers said they had maintained communications with the plane minutes before handing off controls.
This is the second major incident for EgyptAir this year, after another flight was hijacked in late March. A devastating fire blazed across the flight deck of doomed EgyptAir flight MS804 minutes before the aircraft plunged into the Mediterranean, according to the latest theories to explain the disaster.
Authorities had feared the plane was likely to have been the victim of a terrorist bomb attack when it went down on Thursday, killing all 66 people on board. But now a more complex picture is emerging as experts sifted through new data yesterday, making an electronics fire a possible explanation.
Early this morning, Attempts were being taken up Egypt has deployed a robot submarine to search for the flight data recorders of the missing EgyptAir plane. “We are moving hard to retrieve the two boxes,” President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi said in his first public comments on the crash.
