An image grab taken from a video uploaded on the official Facebook page of the Egyptian military spokesperson yesterday shows some debris that the search teams found in the sea after an EgyptAir Airbus A320 crashed in the Mediterranean. — AFP

CAIRO: Smoke was detected inside an EgyptAir plane shortly before it plunged into the Mediterranean with 66 people on board, investigators said yesterday, offering clues but no answers about why it crashed. The Airbus A320 had been flying from Paris to Cairo early Thursday when it plummeted and turned full circle before vanishing from radar screens, without its crew sending a distress signal. Egypt's military released pictures of wreckage recovered so far, including a pink bag decorated with butterflies, a life vest, shredded seat covers and mangled debris showing the EgyptAir name.

France's aviation safety agency said Flight MS804 had transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin as the disaster unfolded. While the information may help investigators, more wreckage including the black boxes will need to be found before they can piece together what happened. "There were ACARS messages emitted by the plane indicating that there was smoke in the cabin shortly before data transmission broke off," a spokesman for France's Bureau of Investigations and Analysis told AFP. It was "far too soon to interpret and understand the cause of the accident as long as we have not found the wreckage or the flight data recorders", he said.

ACARS, which stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, transmits short messages between aircraft and ground stations. Search teams were scouring the eastern Mediterranean yesterday for more parts of the plane and the black boxes. While Egypt's aviation minister has pointed to terrorism as more likely than technical failure, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said yesterday that nothing was being ruled out. "At this time... all theories are being examined and none is favored," he told a news conference in Paris after meeting relatives of passengers.

Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathi told reporters an additional challenge in the hunt for the black boxes was the depth of the Mediterranean in the area under search. "What I understand is that it is 3,000 (meters)," he said. That would place the black box locator beacons, which last for 30 days, on the edge of their detectable range from the surface based on the type of acoustic equipment typically used during the first stages of a search, according to a report into the 2009 crash of an Air France jet in the Atlantic. "No important devices from the plane have been retrieved so far," Fathi said.

The disaster comes just seven months after the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai peninsula in October that killed all 224 people on board. The Islamic State group was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash. Relatives of the passengers on the EgyptAir flight gathered at a hotel near Cairo airport on Friday after meeting airline officials as they struggled to come to terms with the catastrophe. "They haven't died yet. No one knows. We're asking for God's mercy," said a woman in her 50s whose daughter had been on board.

EgyptAir Holding Company chairman Safwat Moslem told AFP yesterday that the priority was finding the passengers' remains and the flight recorders, which will stop emitting a signal in a month when the batteries run out. "The families want the bodies. That is what concerns us. The army is working on this. This is what we are focusing on," he said.

A French patrol boat carrying equipment capable of tracing the plane's black boxes was expected today or tomorrow. The plane disappeared between the Greek island of Karpathos and the Egyptian coast in the early hours of Thursday. It had turned sharply twice before plunging 22,000 feet (6,700 m) and vanishing from radar screens, said Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos.

Aviation Herald, a respected Austria-based website specializing in air accidents, first published a burst of seven messages broadcast over the space of three minutes. These included alarms about smoke in the lavatory as well as the aircraft's avionics area, which sits under the cockpit. While suggesting a possible fire, the relatively short sequence of data gives no insight into pilot efforts to control the aircraft, nor does it show whether it fell in one piece or disintegrated in mid-air, two aviation safety experts said. The data fragments also included alarms related to cockpit window heating and two flight control computers, both of which have backups.

Experts stressed there was not enough information yet to explain the incident. "All you can say... is that there was smoke. The smoke could be due to a fire in the plane following a technical problem, or it could also mean an explosion... but it is far too early to formulate hypotheses," Jean-Pail Troadec, a former BEA director, told AFP. "The fact that there was no distress call doesn't necessarily mean anything," Troadec said. "The pilots maybe had other things to do, reacting to the event. Sending a message is not the first priority."

"The question now is whether the fire that caused the smoke was the result of an electrical fault - for example a short-circuit caused by damaged wiring - or whether some form of explosive or incendiary device was used - for example by a terrorist - to generate a fire or other damage," aviation safety expert David Learmont said. The ACARS data suggested the fire had spread quickly and "that might explain the fact that there was no distress call", Learmont wrote in a blog.

Personal belongings and parts of the Airbus A320 had been spotted by teams searching the sea off Egypt's northern coast about 290 km from the city of Alexandria, the Egyptian military said. Kammenos said the search teams, which include multinational aircraft and ships, had found "a body part, two seats and one or more items of luggage". The passengers were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. They included a boy and two babies. Seven crew and three security personnel were also on board. The European Space Agency said one of its satellites had on Thursday spotted an oil slick about 40 km southeast of the plane's last known location.

In October, foreign governments issued travel warnings for Egypt and demanded a review of security at its airports after the Islamic State group said it downed the Russian airliner over Sinai with a bomb concealed in a soda can that had been smuggled on the plane. IS has been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and has claimed attacks in both France and Egypt. - Agencies