Smoke alerts preceded air crash
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.