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EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo missing

CAIRO — An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo carrying 59 passengers and 10 crew disappeared from radar early Thursday morning.

CAIRO — Most of the passengers on the missing EgyptAir flight are Egyptian, according to EgyptAir's official Twitter account.

According to the airline, 30 of the 56 passengers are Egyptian and 15 are French. The other passengers came from the Middle East, Africa and Europe. There was one passenger from North America. The plane was carrying 66 people altogether.

The airline also confirmed that the plane lost radar contact over the Mediterranean, about 280 km from the Egyptian coast.

 

 
EgyptAir Flight 804 was lost from radar at 2.45 am local time when it was flying at 37,000 feet, the airline said. It said the Airbus A320 had vanished 10 miles (16 kilometers) after it entered Egyptian airspace.
 
Egyptian armed forces were searching for the plane, which was carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two babies, and 10 crew. The pilot had 6,000 flight hours. Earlier, the airline said 69 people were on board.
 
Egypt's state-run newspaper Al-Ahram quoted an airport official as saying that the pilot did not send a distress call, and that the last contact with the plane was 10 minutes before it disappeared from radar. It did not identify the official. 
 
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.
 
Around 15 family members of passengers on board the missing flight have arrived at Cairo airport. Airport authorities brought doctors to the scene after several distressed family members collapsed.
 
The plane most likely crashed into the sea, Ihab Raslan, a spokesman for the Egyptian civil aviation authority, said according to a report by SkyNews Arabia. However, Raslan later told the Associated Press that it was too early to tell if the plane had crashed, and denied speaking to SkyNews Arabia. 
 
The Paris airport authority and the French civil aviation authority would not immediately comment.
 
Greece joined the search and rescue operation for the EgyptAir flight with two aircraft: one C-130 and one early warning aircraft, officials at the Hellenic National Defense General Staff said. They said one frigate was also heading to the area, and helicopters are on standby on the southern island of Karpathos for potential rescue or recovery operations. 

 

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