EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo disappears from radar: airline

An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo with 69 people on board has vanished from radar, the airline said on its verified Twitter feed on Thursday.

A tweet on the airline's official account said flight MS804 left Paris at 23:09 pm local time (2109 GMT), "heading to Cairo (and) has disappeared from radar".

Further tweets in Arabic said contact was lost at 02:45 Cairo time (0045 GMT), when the plane was just inside Egyptian airspace and at an altitude of 37,000 feet (11,000 metres).

There were 59 passengers and 10 crew aboard, according to the airline.

"EGYPTAIR has contacted the concerned authorities and bodies and inspection is underway through the rescue teams," another tweet in English said.

An EgyptAir flight from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked in March and forced to divert to Cyprus, where the "unstable" hijacker demanded to see his ex-wife. He surrendered after a six-hour airport standoff, which ended peacefully.

The incident renewed security concerns months after a Russian passenger plane was blown out of the sky over the Sinai Peninsula. The Russian plane crashed in Sinai on Oct. 31, killing all 224 people on board. Moscow said it was brought down by an explosive device, and a local branch of the extremist Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for planting it.

In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 1990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard, U.S. investigators filed a final report that concluded its co-pilot switched off the autopilot and pointed the Boeing 767 downward. But Egyptian officials rejected the notion of suicide altogether, insisting some mechanical reason caused the crash.