20 May 2016

EgyptAir Flight 804 missing

Slate has an article by Ben Mathis-Lilley about a missing airliner:

NBC reports that the US has some evidence that an explosion took place on Flight 804; the evidence involves satellite data, including images.
Update, 1111: Greek authorities say that debris that appears to be from Flight 804, including two life jackets, has been found in the Mediterranean.
Update, 0810: French President François Hollande says that he can "confirm" that Flight 804 crashed at sea, but did not give any details on how the conclusion was reached or whether wreckage had been found.
It appears that the plane's last contact with the ground took place at 0239 Cairo time, while it was roughly two hundred miles away from the Egyptian coast. Greece's defense minister says the aircraft, an Airbus A320, made "sudden swerves" and fell twenty thousand feet before it disappeared from radar. If that information holds up, it would suggest that the flight was not brought down by a bomb.
0152: A Paris-Cairo EgyptAir flight carrying sixty-six people disappeared off radar over the Mediterranean on Thursday morning, authorities say. Flight 804 was at an altitude of over thirty thousand feet at approximately 0245 local time (six hours ahead of Eastern time in the US) when it lost touch with air traffic controllers. The plane was within Egyptian airspace when it disappeared, EgyptAir says, and reportedly did not make a distress call; Greek and Egyptian personnel are launching a search near its last known location. The BBC says there was not any rough weather in the area of the plane's disappearance.
There have been two high-profile security breaches on Egyptian flights in the past year: an emotionally disturbed man hijacked a domestic EgyptAir flight in March, diverting it to Cyprus, while a Metrojet flight carrying two hundred people to St. Petersburg in Russia crashed shortly after its departure from Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh Airport on 31 October 2015, in what is believed to have been an ISIS bombing.
Rico says this'll turn out to be another bomb, too...

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