Body part and seats f-rom EgyptAir flight MS804 found, says Greece

Debris f-rom the missing EgyptAir plane including a “body part”, two seats and suitcases have been found by Egyptian vessels in the Mediterranean sea, Greece’s defence minister, Panos Kammenos, said on Friday.

“A short while ago we were briefed by the Egyptian authorities ... on the discovery of a body part, a seat and baggage just south of whe-re the aircraft signal was lost,” Kammenos told reporters in Athens.

Flight MS804 had taken a normal course through Greek airspace before the plane abruptly took sharp turns, he said, adding that the cause of Thursday’s crash was still a matter of speculation. The plane crashed at around 2.30am local time on Thursday morning while carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew f-rom Paris to Cairo. All those onboard died.

Earlier Egypt’s military said it had found personal belongings and parts of the wreckage 180 miles north (295km) of the coastal city of Alexandria. The spokesman for the armed forces posted on Facebook that the search was continuing.

Greek authorities said they had received information that the wreckage was discovered 10 miles “f-rom the last known point” of flight MS804.


An image released by the Egyptian defence ministry f-rom an Egyptian plane searching the Mediterranean. Photograph: Uncredited/AP
 

Greece’s lead air accident investigator, Athanasios Binis, said the “point of reference” was an area 130 miles south of the Greek island of Karpathos. The location is now the centre of a major international air and sea operation to find the plane’s black boxes.

“The most important thing is that the plane’s two black boxes are found,” Binis said. “If the cockpit flight recorder and flight data recorder are found, along with wreckage, then a real investigation can begin,” he told the Guardian.

“There are three reasons for a plane [to go down],” he said. “Meteorological, technical and human. The first has now been ruled out because the weather was quite good. Whether a technical factor or human factor, either inside or outside the plane, is to blame remains to be seen. All possibilities are open.”

Egypt has been leading the search effort, with support f-rom France, Greece, Turkey and the UK. The US navy dispatched a P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft f-rom a base in Sicily.

Previous reports of debris have turned out to be wrong. EgyptAir claimed on Thursday that it had found part of the wreckage and lifejackets f-rom MS804 near Karpathos, east of Crete but the airline’s vice-president, Ahmed Adel, later retracted the statement.

The plane, built in 2003, made “sudden swerves” before d-ropping off the radar, Kammenos said on Thursday. It made a 90-degree turn left, and then d-ropped f-rom 37,000 to 15,000ft before swerving 360 degrees right, he said. Contact was lost at 10,000ft, he said.
 

Egypt has been leading the search effort, with support f-rom France, Greece, Turkey and the UK. The US navy dispatched a P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft f-rom a base in Sicily.

Previous reports of debris have turned out to be wrong. EgyptAir claimed on Thursday that it had found part of the wreckage and lifejackets f-rom MS804 near Karpathos, east of Crete but the airline’s vice-president, Ahmed Adel, later retracted the statement.

The plane, built in 2003, made “sudden swerves” before d-ropping off the radar, Kammenos said on Thursday. It made a 90-degree turn left, and then d-ropped f-rom 37,000 to 15,000ft before swerving 360 degrees right, he said. Contact was lost at 10,000ft, he said.

The plane’s captain, Mohamed Said Shoukair, had 6,275 flying hours’ experience. He did not send a distress signal.

Egypt’s aviation minister has said the Airbus A320’s sudden disappearance was more likely to have been caused by a terrorist attack than technical failure. But the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said on Friday that there was “absolutely no indication” of why the flight came down.


 Egyptians pray for the victims of EgyptAir flight 804 at a Cairo mosque. Photograph: Amr Nabil/AP
 

Mike Vivian, former head of operations at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority, told the BBC he thought the plane’s sudden swerves before d-ropping off radar were more likely to be caused by human interference than by a bomb.

“It looks highly unlikely that this was consistent with some sort of explosive device,” he said. “One’s inclined to go towards the theory that there had been some interference in the aircraft and on the flight deck, with the control of the aircraft.”

No group has claimed responsibility for downing the aircraft and officials f-rom multiple US agencies told Reuters that a preliminary examination of satellite imagery had not shown any signs of an explosion. The anonymous sources said the US had not ruled out any potential causes for the crash, including mechanical failure, terrorism or a deliberate act by the pilot or crew.