Update | EgyptAir plane carrying 66 passengers and crew crashed into sea off Greek island

An EgyptAir plane headed to Cairo from Paris with 66 people on board disappeared from radar in the early hours of the morning on Thursday, reviving memories of the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that went missing in March 2014.

EgyptAir Flight 804 was lost from radar at 2:45 a.m. local time when it was flying at 37,000 feet, the airline said. It said the Airbus A320 had vanished 16 kilometres after it entered Egyptian airspace, around 280 km off the country’s coastline north of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria.

A Greek aviation source said the aircraft crashed into the sea off the southern Greek island of Karpathos while in Egyptian airspace. The official said the last communication with the pilot was three minutes before the plane disappeared, and that there had been no distress call.

An Egyptian official said a signal had been picked up from the plane two hours after it disappeared from radar, thought to have been an emergency beacon.

In water crashes, an underwater locator beacon attached to the aircraft’s flight recorders starts to emit a signal or ping. This helps the search and rescue teams to locate the boxes, and the location of the crash.

Egyptian military aircraft and navy ships were taking part in a search operation off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast to locate the plane. The plane was carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two babies, and 10 crew members. The pilot had 6,000 flight hours.

EgyptAir later said those on board included 15 French passengers, 30 Egyptians, one Briton, two Iraqis, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi, one Sudanese, one Chadian, one Portuguese, one Belgian, one Algerian and one Canadian.