Co-pilot’s gadgets may have sparked fatal fire
A pilot’s iPhone, iPad and perfume could have started the fire that brought down an EgyptAir jet over the Mediterranean Sea last May, French investigators suspect.
A blaze that broke out in the cockpit appeared to have begun near the spot by the windscreen where the co-pilot placed the items, investigators told Le Parisien newspaper.
CCTV footage from the gate at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris showed that Mohamed Mamdouh Ahmed Assem, the co-pilot on flight MS804, put his Apple iPhone 6S, his iPad mini and four bottles of cologne on the cockpit’s glare shield before the Airbus A320 took off for Cairo on May 19, the paper reported.
All 66 people aboard were killed in the night-time crash after fire alerts sounded and smoke was detected on the flight deck.
The items were ‘‘at the heart of the investigation’’ because data from the aircraft showed that the first sign of trouble came from the side window by the co-pilot, the paper said.
Regulations require pilots to stow personal items during a flight, and they are not supposed to leave them lying on the instrument panel.
‘‘The images show very clearly that the Egyptian co-pilot placed his telephone, tablet and bottles of perfume bought before boarding on the glare shield,’’ the paper said.
Speculation over a possible battery-derived fire emerged within days of the crash because lithium-ion batteries, typically used in mobile devices, have caused previous incidents on passenger and cargo aircraft. Two cargo jets carrying loads of lithium-ion batteries were brought down when they caught fire over Dubai and South Korea in 2010 and 2011.
The crews of most airliners now use electronic tablets, which have replaced paper charts and other documents used in flight.
A report by investigators noted that batteries in smartphones had undergone spontaneous combustion aboard passenger aircraft in six known incidents, Le Parisien said. In October, the United States banned Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphone from aircraft after reports of the phones catching fire.
Apple said it had not been contacted by any authority investigating the disaster. ‘‘If investigators have questions for us, we would of course assist in any way we can,’’ it said.
The first sign of trouble on board the plane was an automated alert transmitted in the minutes before the flight ended. It signalled malfunctions with the electrical wiring in the windows on the righthand flight deck window, the position beside the co-pilot. It was followed by smoke alerts from the forward toilet and the avionics bay, below the cockpit floor.
Lawyers have accused Egyptian authorities of trying to deflect blame for the crash away from the national airline and on to the hypothesis of a terrorist act that originated in Paris.