BY Taiwo George
There are reports that the EgyptAir Flight 804 which disappeared from radar while heading to Cairo from Paris crashed into the Mediterranean Sea.
The aircraft had 66 people, including two babies, on board.
The airline said the plane was flying at 37,000 feet when it vanished shortly after entering Egyptian airspace.
The incident happened around 20 minutes before the aircraft was due to land.
Aviation officials later said the plane crashed and that a search for debris was underway.
“The possibility that the plane crashed has been confirmed, as the plane hasn’t landed in any of the nearby airports,” said an official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
The Airbus A320 left the French capital’s Charles De Gaulle Airport at 10:09pm (BST) on Wednesday night and then went missing, three hours and 40 minutes into its journey.
The breakdown of the nationalities on board were: 30 Egyptians, 15 French, one British, one Belgian, one Iraqi, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi Arabian, one Chadian, one Portuguese, and one Algerian and one Canadian.
Report said the EgyptAir counter at Charles de Gaulle was empty on Thursday morning after the newsts of the plane’s disappearance broke.
A French airport official said: “It did not land, that is all we can say for the moment.” The French Prime Minister later added that “no theory can be ruled out”.
Ihab Raslan, a spokesman for the Egyptian civil aviation authority, told SkyNews Arabia that the plane most likely crashed into the sea.
Search and rescue teams have been sent to a specific location believed to be 40 miles from the Egyptian coast.
EgyptAir first reported on the disappearance of the flight, tweeting: “An informed source at EGYPTAIR stated that Flight no MS804,which departed Paris at 23:09 (CEST),heading to Cairo has disappeared from radar.”
The airline said the aircraft was ‘fading’ when air traffic control lost contact with the plane at 02:45 Cairo time.
Two aircraft, one C-130 and one early warning aircraft have been dispatched, officials at the Hellenic national defence 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.
Ahmed Abdel, the vice-chairman of EgyptAir holding company, told CNN that no distress signal had been sent, as far as he knew.
He added that there had been no reported problems with the plane when it left Paris.
The captain of the plane, Abdel said, had more than 6,000 flying hours. This includes 2,000 on an A320.
He also said there was no special cargo on board and the airline was not informed about any dangerous objects on board.
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