 "EgyptAir crash: 5 recent aviation accidents that shook the world")
Adding to the spate of mysterious airline accidents in recent years, an EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board crashed in the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday.
EgyptAir Flight 804, an Airbus A320, was flying at 37,000 feet when it disappeared shortly after entering Egyptian airspace at 2:45 a.m. local time, about 280 kilometres off the coastline north of the port city of Alexandria.
Speaking to reporters in Cairo, Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said that it was too early to determine whether the recent crash occurred due to technical problems or the flight had been targeted by terrorists.
The incident comes less than a year after the crash of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt.
In March this year, an EgyptAir flight from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked by an Egyptian national who claimed he was armed with explosives. The situation, however, was defused after hours of negotiations and without any casualties.
While flying remains one of the safest ways to travel, a few major incidents involving planes have hit the headlines in the past few years. We take a look at some of the major accidents.
MH370: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The Boeing 777 vanished from radar screens en route to Beijing with 239 people, including five Indians, aboard.
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Suspected debris from the missing flight have emerged as recently as March this year.
A year after the crash, in July, a part of the aircraft wing was found on La Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean.
After almost two years, a South African teenager and an American lawyer recently found debris on separate occasions off the coast of Mozambique, renewing hopes of solving the mystery of how MH370 went down.
MH17: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014, near the Ukraine-Russia border.
The crash claimed the lives of all 298 people on board and was the second accident within months for the airline.
The crash came in the midst of a raging civil war in Ukraine and immediate allegations were levelled against Russian-backed rebels for shooting down the flight.
A long awaited report into the crash by the Dutch Safety Board said that a Russian-built BUK anti-aircraft missile was responsible for downing the aircraft.
Germanwings: Flight 4U9525 of the German budget airline, with 150 people on board, crashed on March 24, 2015, in southern France while flying from Barcelona to Dusseldorf.
The Airbus A320 crashed around 11 a.m. in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in the southern French Alps. The crash killed the 144 passengers and six crew members on board.
Analyses of the cockpit flight recorder indicated that 27-year-old German co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed the plane into the mountains.
According to reports, Lubitz was suffering from severe depression and had seen 41 doctors in five years, seven of them in the month before the crash.
Debris of the Germanwings passenger jet is scattered on the mountain side near Seyne les Alpes, French Alps
Metrojet Flight 9268: A Russian passenger plane carrying 224 passengers and crew members crashed shortly after take off from Sharm El Sheik, a popular Red Sea resort in the Sinai Peninsula, on October 31, 2015.
Wilayat Sinai, an Egyptian-affiliated group associated with the Islamic States of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the downing of the aircraft, which left no survivors.
Initial examination of the black boxes of the Russian flight belied reports that it was shot down by a missile. However, investigators did not rule out an act of terrorism as the cause behind the crash.
Egyptian Military experts examine a piece of an engine at the wreckage of a passenger jet bound for St. Petersburg in Russia that crashed in Hassana, Egypt. Photo: PTI