As many as 66 people, including 10 crew members, have vanished while going to Cairo by an Egypt air passenger jet. The flight departed from Paris on Wednesday evening and lost contact with ground crews at 2.45 am local time, about 16 km inside Egyptian airspace.

The flight, an Airbus A320 made in 2003, disappeared from the radar while flying at an altitude of 37,000 feet about 10 miles after having entered Egyptian airspace, EgyptAir reportedly said. It further added that the captain of the plane has 6,275 flying hours, including 2,101 hours on the A320.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian naval and air forces started search operations on Thursday morning.

There was no indication of any mechanical glitches or reports of a bad weather, and as such till now there is no detail on the possible reasons for the plane’s disappearance.

In the past too, there have been incidents wherein planes have gone missing. In March 2014, Malaysian airlines ‘Flight 370’ disappeared while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The aircraft last made voice contact with the air traffic control when it was over the South China Sea, less than an hour after it took off.

Later in December the same year, an AirAsia flight that was scheduled to fly from Indonesia to Singapore disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It was found to have crashed into the Java Sea, killing over 155 passengers and seven crew members on board.