More blue and orange plastic objects attached with ropes, believed to come from the missing EgyptAir flight MS804, have been found in the sea about 50 miles southeast of where the aircraft fell, the Greek national defence ministry said on Thursday. Egyptian ships are now heading toward that location to retrieve them.
The first such objects were found within the Cairo Search and Rescue Region (FIR) earlier in the day, at a location that was 200-230 miles southeast of Crete and 100 miles from the initial crash site.
The Egyptian side has informed Greek authorities that it will not need the assistance of Greek ships to retrieve the debris.
Earlier, two orange objects were found by an Egyptian aircraft participating in the search and rescue operation mounted after the EgyptAir flight disappeared over the Mediterranean in the early hours on Thursday morning.
According to protothema.gr, an Egyptian C-295 rescue plane has detected what appear to be debris or recue jackets from the missing EgyptAir A-320. At 4.30 pm (Greek time) the Greek Ministry of Defence confirmed plastic pieces of the missing plane that looked like orange resuce vests had been discovered.
The airplane was en route from Paris to Cairo and had 66 people aboard.
Satellite search
Greece’s National Defence Minister Panos Kammenos on Thursday said that Greece has asked friendly and allied nations with satellites over the eastern Mediterranean to assist in efforts to discover what happened to a missing EgyptAir flight from Paris, whose radar signal was lost at 3:37 on Thursday morning. The minister said that satellite images might possibly provide clues that will help solve the mystery surrounding the plane’s disappearance. Greece is currently participating in the French satellite programme Helios.
The aircraft was flying at 37,000 feet and had just entered Egypt’s Flight Information Region from the Athens FIR when it disappeared from the radar. Kammenos said it had then carried out a 90 degree turn to the left, under unexplained conditions, followed by a 360 degree right-hand turn that brought it spiralling downward to first 15,000 feet and then at 10,000 feet, before it vanished from the radar screens entirely.
Four minutes later, the Greek shipping ministry’s Search and Rescue Coordination Centre gave orders for a Hellenic Airforce C-130 plane to take off from the military airfield in Elefsina to take part in the search and rescue operations, while the Hellenic Navy frigate “Nikoforos Fokas” set sail from Astypalaia for the search area, he said.
The Greek side also agreed to the participation in the search of a French Falcon aircraft and a U.S. P-3C Orion.
Readiness to assist
The defence minister contacted his Egyptian counterpart early on Thursday morning, expressing Greece’s readiness to assist in the search effort and provide all necessary support to Egypt.
The submarine “Matrozos“, which is taking part in the NATO exercise “Active Endeavour” 100 miles from the search site, was given orders to head toward the site if required and F-16s in Crete were put on standby. An Air Force Super-Puma helicopter and a Sikorsky Navy helicopter were sent to the island of Karpathos in case they were needed for a retrieval operation.
Kammenos said that Greece will be at the disposal of Egyptian authorities when they conduct an investigation into the airplane’s crash, while noting that only four other civilian aircraft were in the air at the same time as the EgyptAir flight, and at a substantial distance from it.
Source: ANA-MPA
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