A Portuguese civil engineer is among the dead after EgyptAir’s Flight MS804 en route from Paris to Cairo late on Wednesday went off the radar and crashed in the Mediterranean.
The flight had carrying 66 people on board, including two small children and a baby, seven crew members and three members of the company's security team.
Air Traffic Controllers lost radar contact early on Thursday morning and no distress signal was transmitted by the crew.
In addition to the Portuguese passenger, Engineer João David e Silva who worked for Mota-Engil, there were 30 Egyptian nationals, 15 French, two Iraqis, a Briton, a Belgian, a Saudi, a Sudanese, a Chadian citizen, an Algerian, a Canadian and a Kuwaiti national.
The passenger plane departed from Charles de Gaulle airport at 23.00 on Wednesday heading to Cairo but disappeared from radar contact while flying over the Mediterranean, about three hours and 40 minutes after taking off from Paris.
The head of the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority said the warning of the flight's disappearance was given by Greek air traffic controllers.
The Airbus A320 was flying over the Mediterranean at an altitude of 37,000 feet when it disappeared from radar screens by 1:45 a.m. on Thursday morning, Portuguese time, some 280 kilometres north of the Egyptian coast.
The Egyptian authorities say they believe the plane crashed into the sea after an explosion on board. The aeroplane was out of range of conventional ground to air missiles.
A Greek ship in the area immediately started a search for the downed plane and located two items of debris floating in the sea about 400 kms to the south west of Crete where an emergency signal has been picked up early this morning. These objects later were discounted by EgyptAir as having come from its aircraft.
EgyptAir management confirmed the nationalities of the passengers and Portugal’s State Secretary for Communities announced today that one of the missing was a 62-year-old Portuguese man who worked for Mota-Engil in Johannesburg, South Africa. He later was named as João David e Silva.
Speculation continues as to the cause of what most likely was an on-board explosion with terrorism and a catastrophic malfunction the main contenders.
