EgyptAir plane made ‘sudden swerves’ before vanishing over Mediterranean
Family members of the passengers gather at the airports.
EgyptAir Flight 804 left Paris late Wednesday night but lost contact with the tracking system at 2:30 a.m. Cairo time on Thursday. Armed forces are searching an area 40 miles north of the Egyptian coastline. (The Washington Post)Family members of the passengers gather at the airports.
EgyptAir Flight 804 left Paris late Wednesday night but lost contact with the tracking system at 2:30 a.m. Cairo time on Thursday. Armed forces are searching an area 40 miles north of the Egyptian coastline. (The Washington Post)
CAIRO — An EgyptAir plane made abrupt turns and plunged steeply Thursday, shortly before disappearing from radar over the Mediterranean Sea, a Greek official said, as investigators placed terrorism high on the list of possible reasons the Cairo-bound plane fell from the sky with 66 people onboard.
EgyptAir said earlier in the day that bits of wreckage had been found near the Greek island of Karpathos, about 250 miles from the Egyptian coast. But the airline later retracted the statement after a senior Greek air safety official said on state television that the debris did not belong to the aircraft.
Investigators emphasized they were leaving open all possibilities, but a top Egyptian aviation official suggested that terrorism seemed more likely than a technical failure.
“The possibility of a terror attack is higher than a malfunction, but again, I don’t want to hypothesize,” Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathy, told reporters without giving further details.
Even as a minute-by-minute account emerged of the plane’s last recorded movements, rescue vessels and aircraft combed the sea between Greece’s southern islands and the Egyptian coast. Greek state television reported that “objects” were spotted about 50 miles south of the plane’s last known location, but it was not immediately clear whether the debris were linked to the aircraft.
Officials in Paris, where the flight began, also opened their own investigations into why the Airbus A320 vanished about 45 minutes from its scheduled landing in Cairo. French President François Hollande said the plane had “crashed,” but he gave no more details on what could have brought it down.
“No hypothesis is favored or ruled out at this stage,” a statement from the French prosecutor’s office said about its investigation.
But the sudden cut from ground contact raised inevitable parallels with more recent incidents when attacks, bombs or pilot intervention, not technical malfunctions, brought down aircraft.
Secretary of State John Kerry said he would not speculate on whether an act of terrorism caused the crash.
“I just don’t have the information on which to base this, and I don’t think the experts have the information yet on which to base this,” he said, speaking from a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels. “And nothing does more harm to people or countries than to start speculating ahead of time, so I’m – I don’t want to do that.”
Egypt faces a range of militant threats, including a group affiliated with the Islamic State that is active in the Sinai Peninsula. It claimed responsibility for bringing down a Russian charter flight in October with a possible bomb smuggled onboard, killing all 224 people on a flight from the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.
With EgyptAir, the accounts from Greece — the last point that flight controllers were in contact with the cockpit — detailed a baffling deviation from the flight path.
The Airbus made “sudden swerves” and dropped from 37,000 feet to 15,000 feet moments after crossing from the Greek flight-control area into Egypt’s jurisdiction, Greece’s defense minister, Panos Kammenos, said.
The first turn was a sharp, 90-degree veer to the east after passing over the Greek island of Karpathos, Kammenos told reporters in Athens. Then the plane made a full circular loop — a “360 degree turn,” Kammenos said.
“We cannot rule anything out,” Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail told reporters at Cairo’s airport.
Earlier, there was conflicting information about whether officials received a distress signal from the aircraft. The airline said it received one from the Airbus A320, but the Egyptian armed forces later said they were unaware of such a signal.
Airbus expressed regret over the “loss” of the aircraft in a Facebook statement.
Flight 804 had gone as scheduled while it crossed Europe, passing over northern Italy and down the Adriatic coast. As the plane left Greek airspace, the pilot “was in good spirits and thanked the controller in Greek,” according to Greece’s civil aviation agency.
A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis, said a U.S. P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft will join the search teams. Britain also planned to send a plane and ship.
In Washington, President Obama directed U.S. officials “to reach out to their international counterparts to offer support and assistance,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said there was not yet enough evidence to “ draw any conclusions.”
“If terrorism was indeed the cause,” he said in a statement, “it would reveal a whole new level of vulnerability to aircraft — not only from those flights originating in the Middle East, but to those departing from the heart of Europe and with, at least in theory, far better airport defenses.”
Of the 66 people onboard, 56 were passengers, including two infants and one child, seven were crew members, and three were security personnel. French authorities told reporters at a news conference that it is usual practice for EgyptAir to have three security officers onboard.
Among those onboard, according to the airline, were 30 Egyptians, 15 French nationals, two Iraqis, and one passenger each from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chad, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. No Americans were on the flight.
The pilot had more than 6,000 hours of flight experience, including more than 2,000 hours flying the same model as the vanished aircraft, EgyptAir said. The co-pilot had nearly 3,000 flying hours.
The plane had been in service for more than 17 of the previous 24 hours before the crash, traveling from Asmara, Eritrea, to Cairo, then a round-trip to Tunis, before heading to Paris.
Steven B. Wallace, former director of the Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention at the Federal Aviation Administration, called it “heavy utilization for that kind of aircraft.”
“But I don’t see that as a safety issue as long as the normal flight checks were made,” he added.
Manufactured in 2003, the plane was powered by International Aero Engines and had about 48,000 flight hours, Airbus said.
Relatives of passengers were kept in a lounge with on-site doctors and translators at the Cairo airport. They left after a few hours and were told to await updates by phone. One man with four relatives on the plane said he “knows nothing.”
Amr Sami, a regional EgyptAir spokesman at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, told The Washington Post that EgyptAir flights from the French capital will continue as scheduled.
Meanwhile, family members of those onboard began streaming into a makeshift crisis center at a hotel near the airport. As French police ushered them in, they were tearful and bewildered, some pushing strollers with small children. They did not speak to reporters.
In March, an EgyptAir flight from Alexandria was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus. The suspect, 59-year-old Seif Eldin Mustafa, surrendered and all hostages were released.
In November — just a month after the Russian plane attack in Sinai — the same Islamic State-linked faction posted a video purporting to show one of its members striking an Egyptian navy vessel with a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile. Defense experts believed the weapon was likely a Russian-built SA-18 Igla, which can hit aircraft flying at a maximum of 11,000 feet.
In March 2015, a Germanwings flight plunged into the French Alps after the co-pilot took control in an apparent suicide dive that also claimed the lives of 149 others onboard.
Heba Habib reported from Cairo; Sudarsan Raghavan from Sanaa, Yemen; and Brian Murphy from Washington. James McAuley in Paris; Erin Cunningham in Istanbul; and Yanan Wang, Missy Ryan, Sarah Kaplan and Ashley Halsey in Washington contributed to this report.
