An EgyptAir passenger jet traveling to Cairo from Paris with 69 people on board disappeared off the radar over the Mediterranean early Thursday, the airline said on its Twitter account. Paris, again. EgyptAir said the plane had been 10 miles inside Egyptian airspace when it disappeared. ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood groups have been targetting Egypt and Egyptair has suffered terrorists attacks by devout Muslims.
A Russian passenger plane was attacked and crashed in Sinai last October, killing all 224 people on board. Moscow said it was brought down by an explosive device, and a local branch of the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for planting it.
And one of their EgyptAir’s pilots, Gameel Al-Batouti, plunged the plane in the Atlantic southeast of Nantucket Island 33 minutes after takeoff, while allegedly screaming “allahu akbar.”
The Express is reporting:
EgyptAir MS804 terror fears: Disaster ‘almost certainly caused by BRUTAL ACT’
THE EgyptAir MS804 plane disappearance was “almost certainly” caused by a terror attack, security and aviation experts have said.
By Tom Parfitt and Leda ReynoldsThe plane, which was carrying 66 people including one Briton, 15 French nationals, a Belgian and a Portuguese national, left Charles De Gaulle Airport late last night.
A major search by air and sea is now underway to try to trace the plane and find the cause of the disaster.
Now Jean-Paul Troadec, the former chief of France’s air accident investigation unit, the BEA, said the disappearance was “almost certainly” caused by “an attack”.
Mr Troadec, one of the most respected names in aviation, said the lack of live emergency alert suggested a “brutal event”.
He told Europe 1 radio station in Paris: “A technical problem, a fire or a failed motor do not cause an instant accident, and the team has time to react.“The team said nothing, they did not react, so it was very probably a brutal event and we can certainly think about an attack.”EgyptAir initially said the Egyptian military had received a distress signal, but the military have since denied the claim.
“EgyptAir Flight MS804 Disappears en Route From Paris to Cairo,” By Jon Ostrower, Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2016:
Flight MS804 vanished from radar, the airline said via Twitter
EgyptAir said that one of its aircraft disappeared early Thursday while flying from Paris to Cairo with 66 people aboard.
The Egyptian flag carrier said Flight MS804, which departed Paris at 11:09 p.m. local time, “disappeared from radar” at 2:45 a.m. Cairo time Thursday while at 37,000 feet, according to tweets on the airline’s verified Twitter account.
The Airbus A320, with 56 passengers, including one child and two infants, in addition to three security personnel and seven crew, was last spotted over the Mediterranean Sea en route to Cairo, according to flight-tracking websites.
The airline said that a search and rescue operation was under way. The jet disappeared 10 miles inside Egyptian airspace, which has its northern border in the middle of the Mediterranean, the airline said, one of the planet’s busiest air corridors connecting Europe and the Middle East.
EgyptAir said its A320, which is configured to seat 145, was built in 2003. The pilot has 6,275 flying hours, including 2,101 on the A320, and the first officer has 2,766 flying hours, according to the airline.
Marine traffic in the waters. I wonder if any of the boats would of seen anything
The incident would be the second major air disaster in Egypt since October, when an Airbus A321 operated by Russian carrier Metrojet crashed in Sinai killing all 224 aboard. U.S. and U.K. authorities have said a terror attack likely downed the jet while it was flying from Sharm El Sheikh to St. Petersburg in Russia.Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate in Sinai Province later claimed responsibility for the crash.
The Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi said in February that the plane had been downed by terrorists. The attack decimated Egypt’s once-lucrative tourism industry and contributed to a foreign-currency shortage as flights from Russia and the U.K., two of its biggest sources of tourists, were suspended.
The country’s aviation ministry hired international consultancy Control Risks in December to audit its airport security, attempting to rebuild confidence in its airline.
Indications about what may have befallen the EgyptAir flight weren’t immediately apparent late Wednesday, but the search for MS804 was just beginning. Investigators will likely look to the flight’s origin and destination, France and Egypt, the scenes of major recent terror attacks as a key early clue into the jet’s disappearance.
EgyptAir’s safety record has had a checkered history, including the recent hijacking of a flight in March that was forced to land in Cyprus after a passenger claimed he had a suicide vest. EgyptAir 990, a Boeing 767, was downed by its co-pilot during a flight from New York to Cairo in 1999, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Air accidents remain exceedingly rare and the Airbus A320 is a workhorse of the global aviation system and has an enviable safety record, though it has been involved in recent high-profile air accidents including the crashes of Air Asia 8501 over the Java Sea and the intentional downing of Germanwings 9525.
Under international rules, Egypt is expected to have primary responsibility for conducting the probe, with likely assistance from the plane’s manufacturer, French government experts and perhaps other groups.
One of the first issues investigators typically examine is whether there were any distress calls from the cockpit. In most accident probes, air-crash experts take the lead but law-enforcement officials take over if there are indications that terrorism or criminal actions were involved.
For modern jets, the safest part of any flight typically comes at cruise altitude, which is the phase of flight when the EgyptAir jet appears to have dropped off radar. Among the handful of such crashes in recent years, pilot mistakes combined with weather issues or equipment malfunctions to bring planes down. There also have been instances of pilot suicide or suspected explosives.
Amid a period of record aviation safety world-wide, there wasn’t a single passenger who died in a commercial jetliner crash last year caused by pilot errors or weather or equipment malfunctions.
