(Bloomberg) -- Terrorism is a more probable cause of the EgyptAir crash than a mechanical fault, a senior Egyptian official said hours after the jetliner plunged into the eastern Mediterranean Sea with 66 people on board.
“The possibility of terrorist attack is higher than technical failure, but it is still speculation and assumptions,” Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy said in a televised news conference in Cairo, where the plane had been due to land after completing its flight from Paris.
French President Francois Hollande, whose country has been under its highest level of alert since terror attacks last year, said no hypotheses were being ruled out, and French prosecutors opened a probe since the plane’s last flight left from France. Greek officials said debris had been found near where the plane was last detected, though they couldn’t confirm if it was from flight MS804. A French military Falcon 50 plane is also participating in the search, French officials said.
“If the crew hadn’t sent an alert, then it’s probably a very sudden brutal incident, so one can certainly think of a bomb attack,” Jean-Paul Troadec, a former director of France’s air accident investigation bureau, said on Europe1 radio.
|Flight path
The jet had traveled around North Africa and back and forth to Europe in the days before the crash, according to jet tracker Flightradar24. After returning to Cairo from Paris on May 16, the A320 flew back and forth to Brussels and then made trips to Asmara in Eritrea and Tunis before heading to Paris on Wednesday.
When a Russian Metrojet passenger plane went down last October in the Sinai, Egyptian officials took months before finally accepting it was the result of a bomb smuggled aboard.
Russia said an attack was the likely cause of Thursday’s crash, RIA Novosti reported. It cited Russian Federal Security Service head Alexander Bortnikov as saying all interested parties should take action to find the perpetrators. He didn’t offer evidence to back up his claim.
Russian officials were quick to blame a bomb attack for the October downing of Metrojet Flight 9268, which killed 224 people, and an Islamic State claimed responsibility. Egyptian officials only conceded terrorism was responsible months later, after insisting Russian and other investigators were rushing to conclusions.
|Red Sea resort
Russia, Britain and Germany suspended flights to Sharm el Sheikh, the gateway to Egypt’s most popular Red Sea resorts. Just this month, German authorities authorized the resumption of flights to the Sinai airport, where Egyptian authorities have tightened security.
EgyptAir’s MS804 took off at 11:09 p.m. in Paris with 56 passengers, 7 crew and 3 security personnel. The Airbus320, a modern single-aisle jet manufactured in 2003, was traveling at cruising altitude before disappearing from radar off the Egyptian coast shortly after 2:30 a.m. Cairo time.
The plane made sudden movements before swooping into a deep descent before air-traffic control lost contact, Greek authorities said. Pilots sent no emergency signal, and their final contact with controllers revealed no signs of distress.
|Fatal aviation accidents trending downwards
The number of fatalities in aviation accidents has been trending downwards in recent years thanks to significant safety improvements. If the EgyptAir crash is confirmed, it will be the second major disaster in 2016 after Flydubai Flight 981 crashed in Rostov-onDon, Russia, on March 19, killing all 62 people onboard.
According to data compiled by the Aviation Safety Network, 1972 was the worst year on record for the aviation industy with 2,373 people losing their lives in accidents.
This chart from Statista shows fatalities in airliner accidents since 1942:
You will find more statistics at Statista.
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