Flight From Paris to Cairo Disappears

A flight from Paris to Cairo disappeared from radar early Thursday morning, the airline says. EgyptAir Flight 804 was lost from radar at 2:45am local time when it was flying at 37,000 feet, the airline says. It says the Airbus A320 had vanished 10 miles after it entered Egyptian airspace. Egyptian armed forces are searching for the plane, which was carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two babies, and 10 crew. EgyptAir later confirmed the nationalities of those on board as including 15 French passengers, 30 Egyptians, one Briton, two Iraqis, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi, one Sudanese, one Chadian, one Portuguese, one Algerian, and one Canadian, the AP reports; the nationality of the final person wasn't made clear.

Egypt's state-run newspaper Al-Ahram quoted an airport official as saying that the pilot did not send a distress call, and that the last contact with the plane was 10 minutes before it disappeared from radar. Neither France's Foreign Ministry nor Interior Ministry would comment on the disappearance or on whether it could have been an attack. A spokesman for the Egyptian civil aviation authority tells the AP that, contrary to what he was quoted as saying earlier, it's too early to tell if the plane has crashed. In Greece, officials say two of the country's aircraft have joined the search and rescue operation. They say one frigate is also heading to the area, and helicopters are on standby on the southern island of Karpathos for potential rescue or recovery operations. (More Flight 804 stories.)