It was thought that wreckage of the Airbus A320 had been found. But following closer inspection of the debris, Ahmed Adel, EgyptAir’s vice-chairmen admitted he had been mistaken.
In response Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian president, has demanded an intensified search for the missing jet.
Suspicion remains that the flight from Paris to Cairo was a victim of terrorism, especially with the aircraft being lost within seven months of a bomb bringing down a Russian holiday jet over Sinai.
This was the early hypothesis of both US government officials and Sharif Fathy, Egypt’s aviation minister.
"I don't want to go to speculation. I don't want to go to assumptions like others," he said.
"But if you analyse this situation properly, the possibility of having a different action aboard, of having a terror attack, is higher than having a technical problem."
Alexander Bortnikov, chief of Russia’s top domestic security agency, shared a similar view, “In all likelihood it was a terror attack,” he said.
Campaigning in New Jersey, Donald Trump, the Republicans’s presumptive candidate for the US presidency, said that the plane had been “blown out of the sky”.
However neither the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant nor al-Qaeda have, as yet, claimed responsibility for downing the aircraft.
In addition, a US review of satellite imagery has not, thus far, shown any evidence of an explosion having taken place.
EgyptAir flight 804 left Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris at 21.09 GMT on Wednesday and it was due to land at 01.15 GMT.
There were 56 passengers and 10 crew on board, including one Briton, Richard Osman, 40, a married man with a two-year-old daughter.
Others on board included 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens and a student at the France’s elite Saint-Cyr military academy who was travelling to Chad to mourn his mother.
The flight had been proceeding normally with the pilot in contact with Greek air traffic controllers at 23.48 GMT.
Then with the Greeks wanting to hand on control to their Egyptian counterparts, contact was lost. The first unanswered calls were logged at 00.27 GMT.
At 00.39 GMT the plane fell out of radar contact at 37,000 feet and 170 miles from the Egyptian coast.
The plane is reported to have swerved erratically, first 90 degrees to the left and then 360 degrees to the right.
The plane is believed to have plummeted 22,000 feet before crashing into the sea.
Constantinos Litzerakos, Greece’s head of civil aviation, said the pilot had neither signalled any problems nor deviated from his route before losing contact.
There was no distress call.
The Airbus A320 is considered a reliable workhorse, covering medium haul routes with a range of up to 3,500 nautical miles. The plane was only three years old.
In the cockpit was a pilot with 6,275 hours of flying experience and a co-pilot with 2,766 hours.
If a bomb was smuggled on board, the focus will not only be on Paris, but on other airports the plane had passed through that day, having travelled to Asmara, Eritrea and Carthage in Tunisia.
However as things stand with the wreckage still to be found the investigation is back to square one, according to Bob Mann, a leading US aviation expert.