New Report Disputes Official Account of Communication with Downed Plane

Contradicting official accounts of Thursday’s final moments of EgyptAir Flight 804, a French news outlet reports the pilot of the doomed jetliner spoke with Egyptian air traffic control for several minutes before the plane plunged into the Mediterranean.

Since the crash, authorities have said the plane lurched left, then right, spun all the way around and plummeted 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) into the sea — never issuing a distress call. The crash resulted in the death of all 66 people aboard.

A report on French TV’s Station M6 is now disputing that account. According to the report, pilot Mohamed Said Shoukair had a conversation lasting several minutes with Egyptian authorities, and was reportedly trying to deal with smoke inside the plane.

Flight data automatically sent by sensors on the Airbus 320 has confirmed there was smoke in the cabin and lavatories at the time of the crash.

French TV reported that after Shoukair finished speaking with authorities, the pilot made an “emergency descent.”

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said finding the exact cause of the crash “will take time.” Terrorism has been widely reported as a likely cause of the crash.

“This is not one scenario that we can exclusively subscribe to … all scenarios are possible,” the president said Sunday on Egyptian television.

Egypt has deployed a robot sub to recover cockpit voice and data recorders.

Greek officials say as of 2:48 a.m. local time the pilot was talking to Greek authorities and appeared to be in good spirits. By 3:27 a.m., the sensors detected a fire and a fault in two of the plane’s cockpit windows, according to data published by The Aviation Herald. By that time, there was no response to calls to the plane from the ground. (For more from the author of “New Report Disputes Official Account of Communication with Downed Plane” please click HERE)

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