The Philippine Star

Smoke alerts preceded air crash

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PARIS – The French aviation safety agency said yesterday that the EgyptAir A320 that crashed into the Mediterran­ean with 66 people aboard had transmitte­d automatic messages indicating smoke in the cabin.

“There were ACARS messages emitted by the plane indicating that there was smoke in the cabin shortly before data transmissi­on broke off,” a spokesman of France’s Bureau of Investigat­ions and Analysis told AFP.

A CARS, which stands for Aircraft Communicat­ions Addressing and Reporting System, is a digital system that transmits short messages between aircraft and ground stations.

Unconfirme­d reports about flight data from the Airbus plane that disappeare­d while flying from Paris to Cairo in the early hours of Thursday local time pointed to several problems that its veteran pilot may have struggled with minutes before the crash.

Agency spokesman Sebastien Barthe explained that the messages “generally mean the start of a fire,” but added, “We are drawing no conclusion­s from this. Everything else is pure conjecture.”

He added that it was “far too soon to interpret and understand the cause of Thursday’s accident as long as we have not found the wreckage or the flight data recorders.”

The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, earlier reported that automated warning messages indicated smoke in the nose of the aircraft and an apparent problem with the flight control system.

The warnings came three minutes before air traffic controller­s lost contact with the plane at 0029 GMT on Thursday, the

Journal said. The messages indicated intense smoke in the front portion of the plane, specifical­ly the lavatory and the equipment compartmen­t beneath the cockpit.

The error warnings also indicated that the flight control computer malfunctio­ned, the report said.

CNN also reported smoke alerts on the flight minutes before it crashed, citing an Egyptian source.

Two US officials told Reuters they could not confirm CNN’s report but said an electronic sensor system had detected some kind of disturbanc­e outside the jet around the time investigat­ors believe it began falling from cruising altitude.

One of the officials said the disturbanc­e outside the aircraft may have been caused by its sudden and rapid breakup, but it also could have been generated by some kind of mechanical fault or accident or a possible explosion or attack.

The officials asked for anonymity when speaking about the still-evolving investigat­ion.

A screen grab of the flight data transmitte­d by ACARS to operators on the ground published on the website of the aviation journal AVHerald.com, indicated failures in the jet’s flight control system and alerts related to smoke in a lavatory and the avionics system, minutes before the crash.

The screen grab provided on the website showed only very terse messages sent from the aircraft, such as “SMOKE LAVATORY SMOKE,” “AVIONICS SMOKE” and “F/CTRL SEC 3 FAULT.”

The US officials said they could not confirm the authentici­ty of the data, however, and EgyptAir officials could not be reached for immediate comment.

On Friday, search teams found wreckage including seats and luggage about 290 kilometers north of Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt’s military said.

There was no sign of the bulk of the wreckage, or of a location signal from the black box flight recorders that are likely to provide the best clues to the cause of the crash.

EgyptAir chairman Safwat Moslem told state television that the radius of the search zone was 40 miles, giving an area of 5,000 square miles, but said it may be expanded.

A European satellite spotted a 2 km-long oil slick in the Mediterran­ean, about 40 km southeast of the aircraft’s last known position, the European Space Agency said.

The plane disappeare­d without any distress signal between the Greek island of Karpathos and the Egyptian coast.

 ?? EPA ?? A handout picture made available by the Egyptian Defense Ministry shows a life jacket from the EgyptAir MS804 flight missing at sea.
EPA A handout picture made available by the Egyptian Defense Ministry shows a life jacket from the EgyptAir MS804 flight missing at sea.

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