Piecing together a tragedy
While private Egyptian airlines have come under fire, investigations into the cause of the Sharm El-Sheikh plane crash continue. Amira Ibrahim reports
The decoding of the flight recorders from the Boeing 737 that crashed into the Red Sea on 3 January, killing all 148 people aboard, began on Monday. A French submarine robot named Scorpio recovered the two black boxes from the seabed at a depth of more than 1,000 metres last weekend.
The black boxes include details of the Flash Airlines charter plane's flight and engine control movements from its take-off from the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh to the end of its final 17-second plunge into the sea from a height of some 1,500 metres. Experts will also be attempting to decipher the final conversations between the plane's pilot and crew, who gave no indications of anything being amiss to the control tower before the crash.
While the decoding will be done by Egyptian experts, officials from the French accident investigation bureau, the US National Transport Safety Board and Boeing, the manufacturer of the plane, will act as observers.
The flight data recorder was retrieved on Friday from wreckage scattered on the seabed, while the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) came up on Sunday at dawn. The black boxes were recovered with the help of sound ranging buoys and an accurate map of the seabed produced by a French oceanographic survey ship along with the submarine robot. The boxes were found about 30 metres apart, and immediately treated with chemicals to remove salts before being handed to Egyptian authorities leading the crash investigation.
Hamdi Sami, who heads the Egyptian salvage team, said the CVR was in slightly worse condition than the data recorder, "but hopefully it is good enough to get the data". Sami said that the Scorpio robot had also found "a lot of pieces" from the plane's engines and fuselage lying at the bottom of the sea, including windows and doors. The biggest piece, however, was only two metres long.
The plane splintered after nose-diving at 45 degrees, slamming into the water at 500 kilometres an hour. While aviation officials initially thought that a major part of the plane was still intact in the water, photos taken by the robot showed the plane scattered into small pieces. The wreckage is "spread over 1000-1500 square metres, and it will be very difficult to collect because of the tremendous depth," Sami said. The French government said on Tuesday that its naval units would continue to attempt to recover the cockpit and other parts of the doomed plane for 10 additional days.
Shortly after the crash, both Egyptian and French investigators basically ruled out terrorism or other causes, saying they believed the plane crashed because of some unspecified mechanical fault. Though terrorism is considered unlikely, a French anti-terrorist police officer arrived in Egypt on Sunday, along with investigating magistrate Andre Dando, whose job is to consider possible manslaughter charges for the deaths of the French holidaymakers who made up the vast majority of the plane's passengers. Dando met with prosecutor-general Maher Abdel-Wahed on Monday before heading to Sharm El-Sheikh on Tuesday.
According to Shaker Qilada, who heads the Egyptian investigation team, "the wreckage was found spread over 3-4 kilometres, but is concentrated over 1500- 2000 metres. If the plane exploded," Qilada said, "the wreckage would have been spread out over a much wider space."
Qilada told Al-Ahram Weekly that the initial analysis of the two flight recorders also helped investigators exclude the possibility that the crash was the result of a terrorist act. "The CVR proved that the only people in the cockpit were crew members, and experts have not, while examining pieces retrieved from the plane, found any indications of explosions." Qilada revealed that the CVR included 25 minutes of crew conversations, mostly while the plane was on the ground preparing to take off. "We can now say for sure that there was no sign of a deliberate act; neither sabotage nor a hijacking attempt behind the tragic accident," Qilada said.
He said the team was "working on two basic possibilities: mechanical failure, or human error", but refused to pinpoint the possible mechanical faults that caused the crash. "We do not need to rush to any conclusion. We have to wait while the data recorder and the CVR are being analysed. The full process is delicate and takes time."
According to Qilada, the two boxes are being analysed at Egyptian aviation laboratories that are highly qualified to do the job. "Our labs are more modern than those in Europe, and even the United States. French and American investigators examined the labs and agreed to carry out the work here." Asked if authorities would agree to French or American requests to carry out further analyses at their labs, Qilada was unequivocal. "Under no circumstances will that occur. Even if we failed to analyse the recorders, and they had to be examined by foreign labs, Egyptian experts would still be the only ones authorised to do so."
The probe has also included checks on the crew's backgrounds. A French media outlet had reported that French investigators were discreetly trying to establish whether either of the two pilots had links to Islamist groups. "These are normal procedures that take place with all aviation accidents. We have to check on everyone related to the plane before the crash," Qilada said. "The Egyptian pilots' records are totally clear."
Flash Airlines' safety record came under fire following a report released by the Swiss aviation federal authority, disclosing that the Egyptian charter airlines had been banned from Swiss airspace and airports since October 2002. The report blamed faults in the technical maintenance of the company's planes for the ban. Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafiq defended the private airline, telling reporters that the Swiss ambassador to Cairo admitted to him that a Swiss official had made a mistake when she told reporters that Switzerland had taken steps against the airline.
News agencies quoted the ambassador as saying that he "told the minister that I personally felt that it was not the best time [for the Swiss] to make such a statement so soon after the crash. But I could not admit that the Swiss authorities made a mistake."
Last week, Shafiq had disclosed that the Egyptian airliner had been subject to blackmail by a Swiss ground services company. "I have two letters that prove there is foul play," he had said. "The first letter is from the Swiss company to Flash Airlines threatening to do everything they can to ensure the company would no longer operate in Switzerland unless they pay the 32,000 francs they owed the Swiss company. The second letter is from the Swiss company to the Swiss Aviation authorities and airports, activating the complaint against Flash Airlines and asking officials to ban the Egyptian company."
The British government, meanwhile, revealed that safety concerns had led to 11 airlines being banned from UK airspace in the past three years. The list included an Egyptian cargo airline, Memphis Air. On Thursday, aviation authorities disclosed that the supposedly banned airline had actually flown to a British airport after the alleged ban. "Memphis Air operated a cargo flight to Stansted Airport and obtained permission to land and take off again with no objection," the statement said.
Memphis Air head Hamdi Eissa told the Weekly that the inspection results had not prevented the aircraft from flying with its full load, because "those findings were less than what we refer to as a minimum equipment list cleared by the airline maintenance base."
Eissa showed the Weekly a letter from the UK Transport Department explaining that the company was put on the list "after an adverse ramp check in April 1999, [after which] we sought assurances from the Egyptian authorities about Air Memphis. These assurances were not forthcoming until May 2002." The letter also indicated that Memphis Air had been issued permits since then which allowed it to continue operating services to the UK. "Strangely enough, we discovered that the authorities sent a copy of the alleged ban to one of our major clients in Europe," Eissa said, a move he said clearly showed "there were motives other than concerns over safety." The company has asked lawyers in the UK to file a lawsuit against the BBC for publishing a report claiming that Memphis Air's planes were banned from UK airports. "We will seek $100 million in compensation for the damage caused by the report," Eissa said, explaining that the company had lost contracts as a result.
The Egyptian Al-Sharq Insurance company, meanwhile, has pledged to pay $350,000 in compensation for each victim, after the investigations and technical inspections end. Flash Airlines Chairman Mohamed Nour told the Weekly by phone from the UK that, "we do not want to inflict more pain on the victims' families." Nour said he would be meeting with representatives of the families in the next few days to settle the issue.
