French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says France has offered to send planes and boats to help the search for missing EgyptAir flight. He added that French said no scenario could be ruled out at the moment.
French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said, “Everything must be done to find the plane, that’s why we’re in contact with the Egyptian authorities. We are mobilising and ready to send our military means, planes and boats, to search for this plane.”
French transport minister Alain Vidalies confirmed the report from EgyptAir that there was no cargo on board the Airbus A320.
Officials at France’s foreign ministry were looking into the matter but had no immediate information to report when contacted on the disappearance of the jet or on whether it could have been the result of a terrorist attack.
Mean while, Aviation expert Rusty Aimer commented on what could have happened to the missing, he told Sky News: “Right now, the EgyptAir folks are talking with the Egyptian air traffic control facility.
“They’re in direct contact, trying to get as much information as they can, trying to find out – were there any radar outages in the sector?
“A radar outage … could be a loss of power to the radar station: it could be sabotage, it could be many things. That could be one reason they lost control of the aircraft. The other reason could be the aircraft itself disappearing, which could mean not a good ending.”
He added: “There are two scenarios where the radar blip of an aircraft disappears.
“The first is where the ground radar is not working for some reason and there’s a possibility of that happening.
“The second is if the aircraft itself loses the information it gives to the radar or the transponder.”
Ahmed Abdel, the vice-chairman of EgyptAir holding company, told CNN there had been no distress calls from the plane.
The New York Times quoted Ehab Mohy el-Deen, the head of Egypt’s air navigation authority, as saying: “They did not radio for help or lose altitude. They just vanished.”
Commercial airline pilot Chris McGee told Sky News there were only two circumstances that would prevent a pilot from contacting air traffic control.
“One would be if there was human intervention, if you are prevented from doing so by someone preventing you from doing that, which is a very, very, very unusual situation indeed.
“The second possibility, which is also very unprecedented, is that something has occurred on the flight deck which means we are simply too busy, we have got to handle what is happening to the aircraft at that point in time and we do that first.
“The first thing you are taught is fly the airplane first, handle the problem, and then communicate. So if you have got your hands full that is potentially why you wouldn’t talk to air traffic,” she said.
An EgyptAir flight from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked in March and forced to divert to Cyprus, where the “unstable” hijacker demanded to see his ex-wife.
In October, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for bombing a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board.
source: BBC, SkyNews
