EgyptAir flight vanishes from radar; 66 on board

CAIRO — An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo carrying 66 people disappeared from radar early Thursday morning, the airline said.

EgyptAir Flight 804 was lost from radar at 2:45 a.m. local time when it was flying at 37,000 feet, the airline said. It said the Airbus A320 had vanished 10 miles after it entered Egyptian airspace.

Egyptian armed forces were searching for the plane, which was carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two babies, and 10 crew. The pilot had 6,000 flight hours. Earlier, the airline said 69 people were on board.

Egypt’s state-run newspaper Al-Ahram quoted an airport official as saying that the pilot did not send a distress call, and that the last contact with the plane was 10 minutes before it disappeared from radar. It did not identify the official.

Airbus is aware of the disappearance, but “we have no official information at this stage of the certitude of an accident,” company spokesman Jacques Rocca said.

The plane most likely crashed into the sea, Ihab Raslan, a spokesman for the Egyptian civil aviation authority, said according to a report by SkyNews Arabia. However, Raslan later told the Associated Press that it was too early to tell if the plane had crashed.