‘Nothing is more important’ than finding cause of crash
Search continues for clues to the demise of EgyptAir flight
Three weeks after EgyptAir Flight 804 plunged into the Mediterranean Sea, safety investigators hope they’ll soon find wreckage showing whether a mechanical flaw or crew mistake — or terrorism — downed one of the most widely used jets worldwide.
Although initial speculation pointed to terrorism that brought down the Airbus A320, no evidence of an intentional crash has been found, and no one has claimed responsibility, which is rare in terrorism cases.
“Nothing is more important than finding out what occurred,” said Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. “We have millions of passengers flying daily on thousands of flights essentially in the dark as to whether the safety or security issue that brought this aircraft down could be a danger to the aircraft they’re on.”
There are 6,700 A320s flying worldwide. The jet has been relatively safe: 0.14 accidents involved fatalities per million departures, according to a Boeing study.
Search ships are closing in on the data recorders that will allow investigators to rule out terrorism as a cause.
Egyptian officials pledged Thursday to release a report of their findings one month after the crash May 19. Chief investigator Ayman al-Moqqadem said his team is searching for more debris and body parts for indicators of what caused the disaster.
“No bodies have been recovered so far. We’ve been able only to locate small body parts. DNA tests are underway to identify the remains,” al-Moqqadem said.
Determining the cause of the crash without the so-called black boxes is not possible because so few clues were left before the jet disappeared from radar.
The pilots didn’t call for help before plummeting into the Mediterranean with 66 people aboard the flight from Paris to Cairo. Mayday calls are uncommon in an aviation disaster, leaving the question of whether a catastrophic problem overwhelmed the crew or a bomb destroyed the jet abruptly. The jet’s maintenance system reported clues in the final minutes of flight, including smoke in the jet’s avionics and lavatory and temperature changes in the cockpit windows.
Jeff Price, aviation security professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver, said terrorism also was suspected initially in the crashes of ValuJet Flight 592 and TWA Flight 800 in 1996 and Air France Flight 447 in 2009. Other causes were found in those crashes, and Price leans toward a non-terrorism cause for Flight 804.
“That said, there is some speculation out there that it was caused by terrorist activity, but whichever organization caused it wants to keep their methods secret so that they can repeat it,” Price said. “That is a very scary notion and not completely without precedent.”
Searchers found floating wreckage quickly after the crash. A week ago, the French ship Laplace detected signals from at least one of the jet’s two recorders.
The pingers have batteries that last at least 30 days. Even if they fall silent, the search area has been narrowed, so sonar and video cameras could pinpoint the recorders.
EgyptAir’s pingers should continue for at least another week.
The private company Deep Ocean Search’s ship John Lethbridge is steaming to the scene with a remote-controlled underwater vehicle to search the ocean floor nearly 2 miles deep, starting within days. The Comanche 6000 vehicle has video cameras and limbs to sample and recover objects.
“Even if they go out, it won’t be long before they find them,” Steven Marks, a Miami aviation lawyer at Podhurst Orseck, said of the pingers.
Pilots rarely call air-traffic controllers in a catastrophe because they are trying to keep the plane aloft, he said. That’s why the recorders known as black boxes are crucial to understanding what happened, he said.
The voice recorder captures sounds in the cockpit, which will reveal what pilots were saying and other sounds, such as buttons being pushed or warnings if equipment is malfunctioning. The data recorder will have more than 1,000 types of data about how the jet was operating, such as how the engines were running or what position the wing flaps, horizontal stabilizer and rudder were in.
“The most critical information of the universe of data in the accident is on the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, by far,” Marks said.
The most tantalizing clues were messages from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, which sends maintenance notes during flight to Airbus, the jet’s manufacturer. The final three minutes of messages mentioned cockpit windows, “lavatory smoke” and “avionics smoke.”
“We have millions of passengers flying daily on thousands of flights essentially in the dark as to whether the safety or security issue that brought this aircraft down could be a danger to the aircraft they’re on.” Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board