Search teams yesterday scoured the Mediterranean for more wreckage and the black boxes from EgyptAir Flight MS804 for clues on why the aircraft plummeted and turned full circle before disappearing off radar.
An EgyptAir official said the search was focused on finding the bodies of the passengers and the Airbus A320’s flight recorders, which would stop emitting a signal in a month when the batteries run out.
The aircraft, carrying 66 passengers, plunged into the Mediterranean Sea early on Thursday, while flying from Paris to Cairo.
While Egyptian Minister of Civil Aviation Sherif Fathy has pointed to terrorism as more likely than technical failure, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Marc Ayrault said there is “absolutely no indication” of why the aircraft went down.
“We are looking at all possibilities,” he said, as reports indicated there had been smoke on board and an apparent problem with the flight control system just before the aircraft went down.
The disaster comes just seven months after the bombing of a Russian passenger jet by the Islamic State group over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in October last year that killed all 224 people on board.
Families of the passengers on the EgyptAir flight gathered at a hotel near Cairo International Airport after meeting airline officials, as they struggled to come to terms with the catastrophe.
“They have not died yet. No one knows. We are asking for God’s mercy,” said a woman in her 50s, whose daughter was on board the flight.
EgyptAir Holding Co chairman Safwat Moslem yesterday said that the priority is finding the passengers’ remains and the black boxes.
“The families want the bodies. That is what concerns us. The army is working on this. This is what we are focusing on,” he said.
French investigators met their Egyptian counterparts in Cairo, while a French patrol boat carrying equipment capable of tracing the aircraft’s black boxes is expected today or tomorrow.
The aircraft disappeared between the Greek island of Karpathos and the Egyptian coast in the early hours of Thursday, without its crew sending a distress signal.
It had turned sharply twice before plunging 6,700m and vanishing from radar screens, Greek Minister of National Defense Panos Kammenos said.
The Wall Street Journal and CNN cited unnamed sources as saying the aircraft’s computer systems sent warning messages indicating smoke in the nose of the aircraft just before air traffic controllers lost contact.
The messages indicated intense smoke in the front portion of the aircraft. The error warnings also indicated that the flight control computer malfunctioned, the Journal report said.
It said the information was insufficient to determine whether the aircraft was brought down by a bomb or other causes.
Aviation Security International Magazine editor Philip Baum said that technical failure could not be ruled out.
“There was smoke reported in the aircraft lavatory, then smoke in the avionics bay, and over a period of three minutes, the aircraft’s systems shut down,” Baum said.
“That is starting to indicate that it probably was not a hijack, it probably was not a struggle in the cockpit, it is more likely a fire on board. Now, whether that was a technical fire, a short circuit, or whether it was because a bomb went off on board, we do not know,” he added.
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