EgyptAir flight MS804 with 66 passengers onboard to Cairo has crashed

An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo, which went off the radar on Thursday morning, has crashed in the Mediterranean Sea, according to Egyptian aviation officials. The Airbus A320 had vanished 16 kilometres after it entered Egyptian airspace, around 280 kilometres, off the country's coastline north of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. The Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said it was too early to say whether a technical problem or a terror attack caused the plane to crash. "We cannot rule anything out," he told reporters at Cairo airport. EgyptAir also said that the cause of the disappearance of its Paris-Cairo flight over the Mediterranean, on Thursday, was still unclear as search teams scoured the waters off the Egyptian coast. The director of Greece's Civil Aviation Authority, Konstantinos Lintzerakos, said that air traffic controllers were in contact with the pilot of the EgyptAir flight as it passed through Greek airspace. He added that the plane was at 37,000 feet, traveling at 519 mph, and did not report any problem. Lintzerakos told a private television channel that controllers tried to make contact with the pilot approximately 16 kilometres before the flight exited the Greek Flight Information Range (FIR), but the pilot did not respond. Lintzerakos says controllers continued trying to contact the pilot until 3.39 a.m. Greek time (1239 GMT), when the plane disappeared from the radar. Lyzerakos says the plane was in Cairo's FIR when it vanished. As confirmed by the airline on Twitter, the flight had 66 people on aboard. Airbus put out a statement on its official Twitter page: