CAIRO: Nearly four hours into a flight from Paris to Cairo, an Egyptian passenger plane with 66 people aboard abruptly swerved and plunged thousands of feet before vanishing from radar screens over the Mediterranean Sea, officials said.
Investigators said it was too soon to rule out any possible causes for Thursday’s disaster, but suggested that terrorism was more likely than a technical failure.
EgyptAir Flight 804, an Airbus A320 carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew members, left Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for Cairo at about 11:10 p.m. Wednesday.
Greek air traffic controllers were the last to make contact with the plane, at about 2:30 a.m., as it passed over the island of Kea, just south of the Greek mainland.
The pilot did not mention any problems, Kostas Litzerakis, the head of Greece’s civil aviation department, told reporters.
Shortly after entering Egyptian airspace, the plane made a 90-degree turn to the left, then a 360-degree circle to the right, dropping from 37,000 to 15,000 feet, Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said at a news briefing in Athens. It disappeared from radar screens at about 10,000 feet, he said.
At 2:50 a.m., air traffic controllers confirmed they had lost contact with the plane, Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, said at a news conference in Cairo.
He cautioned that it was too soon to draw conclusions about what happened to the plane. But he acknowledged that the possibility of a terrorism attack was “higher than the possibility of having a technical failure.”
The calamity immediately brought to mind the disappearance of a Russian Airbus over the Sinai Peninsula in October, a crash that Moscow said was probably the result of a bomb.
A senior U.S. law enforcement official who was briefed on Thursday’s crash also said investigators were leaning toward a terrorist act but had not ruled out other scenarios.
Investigators were examining possible reasons for the abrupt turns, but the theories all holes that might not be filled until the wreckage and cockpit voice and data recorders are retrieved, said a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly.
A bomb may have exploded inside the aircraft, but an explosion at that altitude probably would have caused the plane to disintegrate, the official said. Radar data suggested the jetliner remained intact at least until it reached 10,000 feet.
A hijacker also could have tried to commandeer the aircraft, resulting in a struggle in the cockpit. But that situation probably would have generated a distress call.
It was also possible that a pilot might have intentionally crashed the plane. That’s what the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded happened in 1999, when an EgyptAir flight from Los Angeles to Cairo crashed into the Atlantic Ocean about 60 miles south of Nantucket Island, Mass., killing all 217 people on board. Egyptian authorities blamed an unspecified mechanical failure.
U.S. counterterrorism officials were running the names on the flight manifest through terrorist watch lists to see whether any of the passengers or crew may have extremist ties, another U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, briefed him at the White House early Thursday.
In France, the suddenness of the aircraft’s disappearance also raised suspicions of foul play. Jean-Paul Troadec, former president of the French air accident investigation bureau, told Europe 1 radio that it was unlikely to have been a mechanical failure.
“There’s a strong possibility of an explosion on board from a bomb or a suicide bomber,” Troadec said.
“We could also consider a missile, which is what happened to the Malaysia Airlines aircraft in July 2014. If the crew didn’t send an alert signal, it’s because what happened was very sudden.”
“A problem with an engine or a technical fault would not produce an immediate accident,” he added. “In this case, the crew did not react, which makes us think of an explosion.”
A Greek Defense Ministry source said it was also investigating an account from a merchant ship captain of seeing a “flame in the sky” south of the Greek island of Karpathos.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault was more guarded in his assessment. After visiting passengers’ families at a crisis center near Charles de Gaulle Airport, Ayrault called for solidarity and compassion for the “anguished families” and said theorizing should stop.
“We have to remain extremely careful before commenting or expressing theories about what happened,” he said.
Jean Serrat, a former French commercial pilot, told France’s BFMTV there were only three realistic hypotheses: The aircraft was hit by a missile, there was a “major technical incident” that led to it exploding midflight, or something exploded inside.
“One thing is certain, it happened suddenly. There was no message, no signal. ... The pilots had no time to say anything, it happened so quickly.”