An
EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo disappeared
from radar Thursday
morning, with 56 passengers and 10 crew aboard.
EgyptAir
said “flight number MS804 lost contact with radar at 02:45 Cairo
time” Thursday, which would be 8:45 p.m. EDT Wednesday. Egyptian
naval and air assets were conducting searches Thursday morning.
The
flight, an Airbus A320 made in 2003, disappeared from radar while
flying at an altitude of 37,000 feet about 10 miles after having
entered Egyptian airspace, EgyptAir
said.
An
airline official told CNN the departure from Paris’s Charles
de Gaulle Airport was uneventful and there was no special cargo on
board. According to EgyptAir, the captain has 6,275 flying
hours, including 2,101 on the A320.
There
was no indication that EgyptAir or any civil air authority had
received any distress calls or other indication of mechanical
trouble. There were no reports of bad weather and there is no terrain
over the Mediterranean Sea as the plane would be approaching Egypt.
Juliette
Kayem, CNN national-security analyst, said that these absences
implied terrorism.
“The
height of the airplane with no record of any distress calls from the
pilot or the plane is reflective of previous terrorist attacks,”
she said.
“I’m
not saying I know what it was. These are just data points,” she
cautioned. But “I would definitely start from the assumption [that]
something bad, something nefarious happened.”
Mary
Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general, spoke
similarly, telling CNN “one can logically assume at this point
there’s trouble.”
Sky
News Arabia reported
that “Egyptian aviation authorities [have] raised the alert level
at Cairo airport.” Families of people aboard the flight were
gathering there Thursday morning.
Both
France and Egypt have had their transportation networks attacked by
Islamic State and allied terrorists in recent years, ranging from a
lone jihadist going on a knife rampage on a French train to the
shooting down of a Russian airliner leaving an Egyptian resort.
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