The Telegraph’s Ben Riley-Smith writes:

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman has given this statement on the disappearance of EgyptAir flight MS804.

“Obviously we are very concerned by the disappearance of the plane. As you would expect our thoughts are with the families and friends of anyone affected.

“We are working closely with the Egyptian and French authorities to confirm information and our Foreign Office staff are in contact with the family of a British national who is believed to have been on board and provide support.

“I am not in a position to confirm that there is a British national is on board.”

Greece’s defence minister adds that the plane appears to have fallen more than 20,000 feet and then spun sharply before it disappeared.

 

Francois Hollande, speaking at an Elysée press conference, says: “We must ensure that we know everything on the causes of what happened. No hypothesis is ruled out or favoured.”

“Whether it was an accident or another hypothesis that everyone has on their mind – a terrorist hypothesis… at this stage we must focus on our solidarity with the families and the search for the causes of the catastrophe.”

“The picture we have at the moment on missing EgyptAir aircraft is that it was in Egypt airspace at 37,000 feet and made a sudden swerve,” Greece defence minister has just said at a press conference.

Francois Hollande, the French President, has confirmed at a press conference that flight MS804 crashed while flying in Egyptian airspace over the Mediterranean.

“We must ensure that we know everything on the causes of what happened. No hypothesis is ruled out or favoured,” he said.

 

From David Chazan at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris:

The Paris prosecutor has opened an investigation into the disappearance of the plane. No theories are being ruled out, the prosecutor’s office said.

If it is confirmed that the airliner was downed by a terrorist attack, investigators will be looking at the backgrounds and movements of ground personnel such as baggage handlers, police sources said.

A number of baggage handlers and other airport staff have been suspended or lost their jobs because they were suspected of links to radical Islam.

However, the sources stressed that the airliner may have been downed by a mechanical failure. No credible claims of responsibility have been made.

Magdy Samaan in Cairo writes:

The families of the passengers of flight MS804 have been joined at Cairo airport by the French ambassador to Cairo, who arrived at around noon and stayed about half an hour, leaving without giving any statements to the media waiting outside the hall.

“They didn’t give us any hope,” said a man who has four relatives on board. They include his uncle, his uncle’s wife and two of their daughters.

“They told us that the plane fell into the sea.”

He said that the deputy head of EgyptAir told relatives of the passengers that the company has no further information, other than that the plane is missing and did not send an SOS message.

The deputy head stressed that the causes of the crash remain unclear.

One woman burst into tears and said: “No body wants to assure us.”

She said that her daughter was on board and she had spoken to her only yesterday.

The Egyptian authorities are cautious in giving statements. They said that they will provide the press with all the latest information they have at a press conference at 1:30pm Cairo time (12.30pm London time).

One of the passengers’ relatives said that families are doing their best to stay composed.

 

David Chazan at Charles de Gaulle airport writes:

The French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and the transport minister, Alain Vidalies, have spoken to relatives of passengers at the Hotel Mercure near the airport.

About 10 counsellors and medics are helping shocked family members at the hotel.

Mr Ayrault told reporters after meeting relatives that they were still coming to terms with the tragic disappearance of the plane.

“For the time being, were are above all in solidarity with the families who are suffering,” Mr Ayrault said. “They are anxiously waiting for information.”

The minister said no assumptions should be made about what happened to the airliner until more definite, “verified information” was available.

Officially the cause of the flight’s disappearance remains unknown but investigators believe it is likely to have been a terrorist attack.

If confirmed, that will inevitably raise questions about Paris airport security. Precautions were increased after the November terrorist attacks in the French capital, and security was further heightened after the Brussels airport attack in March.

Additional police were deployed at the two main airports in Paris, Charles de Gaulle-Roissy, where EgyptAir flight MS804 took off for Cairo at 11:09 PM local time on Wednesday, and Orly.

Police now carry out extra patrols the perimeter of the airport and access to the airport terminals is more strictly controlled, with ID checks.

French aviation experts said that if the plane was only on the ground for an hour or two before taking off to return to Cairo, it might not have been fully inspected by Paris security officers.

The Telegraph’s Hugh Morris writes:

EgyptAir, the airline whose plane lost contact with radar on Thursday morning and is believed to have crashed off the coast of Greek island, Karpathos, was the same airline involved in the “selfie hijacking” earlier this year.

It is not yet clear what has happened to Flight MS804, which was flying from Paris to Cairo.

But it was another EgyptAir plane that played host to a bizarre incident in March when a disgruntled husband said he had explosives strapped to him and took control of an Airbus A320 en route from Alexandra to Cairo. Ben Innes, one of the British passengers on-board, became briefly famous for daring to pose for a photo with the hijacker.

That episode ended without anybody coming to harm, which was not the case in 1985, when one of the airline’s planes was taken over by the terrorist group Abu Nidal Organisation.

Henry Samuel in Paris writes:

France’s domestic intelligence chief warned just a few days ago that France was at risk of coming under “a new form of attack” from Isil and that the country was clearly its top target, it has emerged.

Patrick Calvar, director general of the DGSI agency, also warned that Europe is in “grave danger” of major unrest involving a far-Right backlash in the wake of any fresh terror attacks.

‘We risk being confronted with a new form of attack: a terrorist campaign characterised by leaving explosive devices in places where big crowds gather, multiplying this type of action to create a climate of panic,” Mr Calvar told a parliamentary committee on national defence in Paris on May 10.

His comments were picked up by French media on Thursday.

The DGSI (General Directorate for Internal Security) is France’s equivalent of the MI5 and is responsible for guarding against internal threats

France has been under a state of emergency since the Paris attacks in November, which killed 130 people.

Mapped: Terror threats around the world 

 

A Roissy airport employee is reportedly “devastated” after helping a family with five children board the fateful EgyptAir flight last night after they arrived late, according to French media reports.

She is still unsure whether they made the flight.

The staff member, known only as Sonia, told RTL radio: “It was a family, parents with five children: four girls and a boy. They turned up at Terminal 2, where I work. But EgyptAir operates from Terminal 1 so I showed them how to get there.

“The father was started to get stressed because he could see the time and that they had been mistakenly dropped off Terminal 2 by the taxi. I could see the dad was stressed so I said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll try and call the company to see if they can exceptionally wait for you’ – something I never normally do.”

“And so they left. I hope they didn’t make it. One of the girls even said to her father: ‘Listen dad, if we make it, we make it and if we don’t we’ll just take the next one. That’s all there is to it.’ I understood as I’m of North African origin. I keep playing yesterday’s scene over, and I’m in shock.”

Initial reports said that a boy and two babies were on board.

 

Aviation experts have told AFP that the chances of a mechanical malfunction in the case of Thursday’s EgyptAir disappearance are slim.

“A major technical fault – the explosion of a motor, for instance – seems improbable,” said aeronautics expert Gerard Feldzer, underlining that the A320 in question was “relatively new”, having entered service in 2003.

“In addition, the A320 has an excellent safety record as the best-selling, medium-range airliner in the world. An A320 takes off or lands every 30 seconds around the world.”

“It’s a modern plane, the incident happened in mid-flight in extremely stable conditions. The quality of the maintenance and the quality of the plane are not in question in this incident,” Jean-Paul Troadec, former director of France’s aviation Bureau of Investigation and Analysis, told Europe 1 radio.

Egyptair “is a company with authorisation to operate in Europe, so it is not on any blacklist,” he added.

It was also unlikely the plane was shot down, experts said, as the region is one of the most monitored in the world and it would be hard to conceal such an attack.

That leaves a terrorist attack as the remaining possibility.

“A bomb placed on board at Roissy or in Cairo is always possible because it’s difficult to make your airport 100 percent watertight, even in an airport with such tight surveillance as Roissy (Charles de Gaulle),” Feldzer said.

“The first thing to do is to recover debris that will give us some indications on the accident… to see if there are any traces of explosives.”

 

The Telegraph’s Alan Tovey writes: 

The EgyptAir jet that was lost over the Mediterranean Sea was an Airbus A320, currently the world’s best-selling airliner and a workhorse of the skies.

The A320 is a single aisle, short- to medium-haul aircraft with a range of about 3,500 nautical miles and has a list price of $98m.

In a typical two-class seating configuration used by most scheduled flights, the A320 holds about 150 passengers, though this can rise to more than 180 in a high-density layout used by low cost and charter airlines. It is operated by two pilots and up to eight cabin crew.

 

Though EgyptAir said in a statement that it was informed by the military of a distress call sent roughly ten minutes before flight MS804 vanished, the Egyptian army has denied this.

Prime Minister Sherif Ismail says there was no distress call but there was a “signal” received from the plane.

He did not elaborate further on what that signal meant,

Footage has emerged which purports to show the plane’s final moments as it turned into what eyewitnesses described as a “ball in the sky.”

The video was broadcast by Seven News Sydney and the Telegraph is yet to independently verify it.

Airbus has issued the following statement:

Airbus regrets to confirm that an A320 operated by Egyptair was lost at around 02:30 am (Egypt local time) today over the Mediterranean sea. The aircraft was operating a scheduled service, Flight MS 804 from Paris, France to Cairo, Egypt.

The aircraft involved, registered under SU-GCC was MSN (Manufacturer Serial Number) 2088 delivered to Egyptair from the production line in November 2003. The aircraft had accumulated approximately 48,000 flight hours. It was powered by IAE engines. At this time no further factual information is available.

In line with ICAO annex 13, Airbus stands-by ready to provide full technical assistance to French Investigation Agency – BEA – and to the Authorities in charge of the investigation.

The first A320 entered service in March 1988. At the end of April 2016 over 6700 A320 Family aircraft were in operation worldwide. To date, the entire fleet has accumulated nearly 180 million flight hours in over 98 million flights.

Our concerns go to all those affected.

Airbus will make further factual information available as soon as the details have been confirmed and cleared by the authorities for release.

 

Egypt’s Prime Minister Sherif Ismail has said he could not rule out any possibility when asked whether an extremist attack was behind the EgyptAir crash in the Mediterranean sea, reports Claire Lomas. 

The Telegraph’s Defence Correspondent Ben Farmer writes:

MoD officials are discussing what help the UK could give to search for the plane.

The Royal Navy has three ships in the Mediterranean on operations. HMS Enterprise, RFA Cardigan Bay and RFA Lyme Bay are all in the area and could join a search if requested, the Navy said.

Cardigan Bay also has a helicopter on board. However all are one to two days sail from the area where the plane was lost.

A Royal Navy source said: “We stand ready to help.”

An EgyptAir plane has crashed in the Mediterranean after it vanished from radar in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The plane had been flying from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Cairo and reportedly set off a distress signal roughly ten miles into Egyptian airspace

There were 56 passengers and 10 crew members onboard

A Greek airport source has told news agency AFP that they believe the plane crashed off the island of Karpathos.

French security officials say they “cannot rule out the possibility of a terror attack.”

EgyptAir Flight MS804 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, around 175 miles off the country’s coastline north of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria.

Aviation officials say the plane crashed and that a search for debris was now underway.

In Paris, the Telegraph’s David Chazan reports that French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and the transport minister, Alain Vidalies, are on their way to Charles de Gaulle airport to console the victims.

Family members are being received at the nearby Hotel Mercure before being escorted by police to the crisis cell inside the airport.

The two ministers will hold a press conference after meeting relatives.

“We are at the disposition of the Egyptian authorities with our military capacities, with our planes, our boats to help in the search for this plane,” Mr Ayrault said.

 He spoke after French President Francois Hollande held an emergency meeting at the Elysee Palace.

In Cairo, the Telegraph’s Magdy Samaan reports that EgyptAir has set up a crisis center to find out what happened to the crashed EgyptAir plane.

The Egyptian Prime Minister Shereef Ismail has arrived at the crisis centre, where he met with EgyptAir officials to discuss the situation.

Egypt’s minister for civil aviation has cut short a visit to Saudi Arabia so he can help deal with the crisis.

Search and rescue ships have been deployed deployed to comb the area where the missing EgyptAir flight MS804 lost signal.

 

 

Greek airport sources have told AFP that they believe flight MS804 crashed off the Greek island of Karpathos in Egyptian airspace.

 

Friends and family of those who were onboard flight MS804, who are now feared dead after officials said the plane crashed, have gathered at Cairo airport.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 disappeared off radar  shortly after entering Egypt’s airspace over the Mediterranean Sea.

The plane, said to be carrying 69 people on board, 59 passengers and 10 crew members, took off from France’s Charles de Gaulle airport on 18 May night and had been expected to land in Cairo on 19 May early morning.

 

EgyptAir says it is yet to confirm why flight MS804 vanished from radar and then crashed in the early hours of Thursday morning.

“The search and rescue aircraft from the Egyptian air force are at the position where we lost contact. They are still looking and so far there is nothing found,” EgyptAir vice chairman Ahmed Adel told Reuters earlier.

 

Henry Samuel in Paris writes:

France has offered to send planes and boats to the crash area, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister declared this morning.

French president François Hollande spoke to his Egyptian countepart, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi this morning, Mr Ayrault confirmed.

We are at Egyptian authorities’s disposal with our military means, our planes and boats, to help find this plane, but for now the priority is to help and inform the families.”

A crisis cell has been set up at the foreign minister and a single number for families has been opened. A crisis cell has been opened at the French embassy in Cairo, he added.

Alain Vidales, the French transport minister, confirmed that there was “no freight” on board the plane, and that there were three security agents, which was a “normal procedure for this company”.

 

The missing EgyptAir flight sent a distress message less than ten minutes before the plane vanished from radar screens, a spokesman for the airline has said in a statement.

The distress message was reportedly received at 00.26 GMT (01.26 London time).

 

David Chazan in Paris writes:

A crisis cell for relatives of passengers has been set up at the airport where flight MS804 took off for Cairo at 23:09 local time on Wednesday.

The cell at Charles de Gaulle airport is located in an area barred to media and the public.

French officials and EgyptAir staff are on hand to speak to the families. Medical personnel, psychologists and counsellors are also available.

An emergency number set up by the French authorities is “saturated with calls”, French media reported.

Officials have formed a second crisis cell at the airport to collate and analyse available information about the airliner and what may have happened.

The plane may not have been fully inspected by French security personnel if it spent only 90 minutes on the ground to pick up passengers before returning to Cairo, aviation experts said.

An Egyptian aviation official says a search is now underway for plane debris following the crash of flight MS804.

“The possibility that the plane crashed has been confirmed,” the official told AP.

 Egyptian aviation officials now say they believe flight MS804 crashed.

The plane is an Airbus A320 and is not the first of its kind to be involved in a crash.

 

Egyptian aviation officials have told the Associated Press that the EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo with 66 passengers and crew on board has crashed.

They gave no further details on where the plane went down, but it was last spotted on radar 10 miles into Egyptian airspace over the  Mediterranean.

 

Magdy Samaan in Cairo writes:

An official in Egyptair said Egyptian said that search and rescue operations have received an SOS message from the plane’s emergency device at 4:26 am Cairo time (3.36am London time).

The statement said that the Egyptian military sent some planes and navy units to search for the plane, and that the Greece has sent some planes with coordination with Egypt.

 

Greece said it had deployed air assets and a frigate to an area in the southern Mediterranean where an EgyptAir aircraft vanished from radar screens early on Thursday.

A defence ministry source said authorities were also investigating an account from the captain of a merchant ship who reported a “flame in the sky” some 130 nautical miles south of the island of Karpathos.

David Chazan in Paris writes:

A French security source told the Telegraph: “We cannot rule out the possibility of a terrorist attack.”

It comes as EgyptAir released the full passenger manifest and said that one Briton is onboard.

The French president, Francois Hollande, is to speak to his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in the next few minutes.

The prime minister, Manuel Valls, said: “We must be extremely prudent (about the possible causes). We are trying to gather all the information available.”

More from David Chazan: 

The French president, Francois Hollande, is to speak to his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in the next few minutes.

The prime minister, Manuel Valls, said: “We must be extremely prudent (about the possible causes). We are trying to gather all the information available.”

Mr Hollande is to chair a crisis meeting at 8:30 am Paris time.

David Chazan has more from Paris:

A French security source told the Telegraph: “We cannot rule out the possibility of a terrorist attack.”

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, confirmed: “We are not ruling out any hypothesis.”

Meanwhile the crisis cell set up at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris includes medical personnel, psychologists and counsellors.

The French foreign ministry has opened an emergency number for relatives of those aboard. It is +33 (0)1 43 17 55 95.

Terminal 3 at Cairo International Airport has been closed off except for passengers, according to the Guardian. Other flights are operating normally.

According to airport security, the families of passengers of the EgyptAir flight have been relocated to a lounge in terminal 1, where an emergency team is monitoring the situation.

French: 15

Egyptian: 30

British: 1

Belgian: 1

Iraqi: 2

Kuwait: 1

Saudi: 1

Sudan: 1

Chad: 1

Portuguese: 1

Algerian: 1

Canadian: 1

 

 

David Chazan in Paris says:

“Sky News Arabia reported that the passengers include one Briton, several French nationals, at least one Iraqi, Egyptians and Saudis.

Security has been extremely tight in Paris since the terror attacks in the French capital in November. “We would be extremely surprised and concerned if there had been a security breach at Charles de Gaulle (airport),” a French official said. “We believe that is highly unlikely.”

The A320 is considered one of the most reliable passenger airliners, aviation experts in Paris said.

A radar map shows the route of the missing EgyptAir flight MS804 before it loses signal 10 miles into Eygptian air space:

EgyptAir releases national and international toll-free phone number for relatives of missing Flight 804 passengers.

Greece joined the search and rescue operation for the EgyptAir flight with two aircraft, one C-130 and one early warning aircraft, officials at the Hellenic National Defense General Staff said, the Associated Press reported.

They said one frigate was also heading to the area, and helicopters are on standby on the southern island of Karpathos for potential rescue or recovery operations.

 

Airbus, the missing A320’s manufacturer , says it has “no further details” on MS804 for now:

David Chazan in Paris says:

“A French airport official said: ‘It did not land. That is all we can say for the moment.’

French personnel will take part in the investigation because the plane is an Airbus and took off from Paris, the official said.

French nationals are likely to be among the passengers, but there has been no official confirmation of that.”

A “crisis cell” is being set up at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, French BFM TV reported.

No word yet from French authorities on the nationalities of those aboard.

• Contact was lost at 2:45 am Cairo time (0045 GMT), when the plane was just inside Egyptian airspace and at an altitude of 37,000 feet.
• 56 passengers confirmed as being on board, including one child and two babies.
• Captain has 6,275 flying hours experience. The copilot has 2,766.
• The plane was manufactured in 2003.
• No sightings of debris, no distress call.

A news alert from Reuters quotes a French airport official as saying: “It did not land. That is all we can say for the moment.”

This is apparently the last satellite communication from the plane – which shows it within Egypt air space:

 There were no reports of adverse weather over the Mediterranean at the time when the plane went missing.

 

But could the flight path over the Alps have been a factor:

 

There was no distress call from the plane Ahmed Abdel, EgyptAir holding company’s vice-chairman, has told CNN.

“Search and rescue has been dispatched and are now at the scene… Daylight has just broken around an hour ago, so we should get some information within the next hour,” Mr Abdel said

He says search teams were informed the coordinates of where the aircraft lost contact and a rescue plane has arrived at that area.

This is at the border of the flight information region (FIR) between Athens and Egypt, about 30 miles north of the Egyptian coast.

 

An Airbus A321 operated by Russia’s Metrojet crashed in the Sinai in 31 October 2015, killing all 224 people on board. Russia and Western governments have said the plane was likely brought down by a bomb, and the Islamic State militant group said it had smuggled an explosive on board.

Reuters reported in January that an EgyptAir mechanic, whose cousin joined Islamic State in Syria, is suspected of planting the bomb, according to sources familiar with the matter.

In March, an EgyptAir plane flying from Alexandria to Cairo washijacked and forced to land in Cyprus by a man with what authorities said was a fake suicide belt. He was arrested after giving himself up.

A map on website Flightradar24 appears to indicate the the aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea.

National carrier EgyptAir said on Thursday a flight from Paris to Cairo had disappeared from radar shortly after entering Egyptian airspace.

“An official source at EGYPTAIR stated that Flight no MS804, which departed Paris at 23:09 (CEST), heading to Cairo has disappeared from radar,” the airline said on its Twitter account.

The airline has then corrected its statement and said that the plane lost contact ten miles after entering Egyptian airspace.

EgyptAir has contacted the concerned authorities and bodies and inspection is underway through the rescue teams, it said on Twitter.

CNN said the plane was carrying 59 passengers and 10 crew. A later Tweet by EgyptAir said the plane, which was travelling at an altitude of 37,000 feet (11,280 metres), disappeared about 80 miles (130 km) before it was due to enter Egyptian airspace.

According to flightradar24.com, the plane was an Airbus A320 and its last known position was above the Mediterranean Sea.