Investigators quickly discounted the possibility of a massive terrorist bomb. When Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the plane’s transponder, which emits a radio signal, instantly stopped. EgyptAir’s transponder kept working for 40 seconds after radar images showed the plane beginning its dive. It is still possible that the aircraft was shaken by a small bomb or that someone stormed the cockpit or that the pilot somehow became disabled. While investigators played down terrorism, they didn’t rule it out. Or the plane itself may have been the culprit, its passengers the victim of a catastrophic mechanical breakdown.
Only one thing seems certain: the 217 people aboard Flight 990 had too long to contemplate their own demise. The radar track of the lost plane shows it dropping from 33,000 feet to 16,700 feet in 40 seconds. Plummeting at almost the speed of sound, the passengers would have been battered by G-forces, but probably not knocked unconscious. Nearly 15 years ago, a Boeing 747 jumbo jet flown by China Airlines stalled and fell–upside down–more than 10,000 feet in 30 seconds. Only two passengers were seriously injured, but the experience was sheer terror. After a moment of weightlessness at the top of the dive, passengers were flattened against their seats or thrown to the ceiling. “People were popping up like popcorn,” a passenger, Seksan Caniyo, told the Los Angeles Times. Another passenger, Alex Noll, recalled, “I looked through the window and saw the sun below and the water up above… I said goodbye to my wife and mentally gave up my belongings.”
The pilots aboard the China Airlines flight managed to slow the plunge and finally level out after dropping an additional 20,000 feet in two minutes. Similarly, on the radar track of EgyptAir 990, the plane appeared to level out at about 16,000 feet and even climb as high as 24,000 feet–but then it nose-dived and apparently started breaking apart at about 10,000 feet. The roller-coaster effect suggests that the pilots of Flight 990 were wrestling to regain control. But aviation experts last week pointed out that the natural tendency of an airplane gaining speed on a nose dive is to level out. The wings pick up lift, especially as they hit the thicker air at lower altitudes.
No “mayday” distress signal was picked up from Flight 990. Were the pilots somehow incapacitated? The passenger list, with 30 Egyptian military officers, raised suspicions that EgyptAir was a target for terrorists. The airline is state-owned, and the regime in Cairo is regarded by Islamic extremists as a tool of the Great Satan. Since the August 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, law-enforcement agencies have rounded up about 100 suspects, many tied to alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. EgyptAir carries armed guards on board, but security is hardly airtight. On an EgyptAir flight from Istanbul to Cairo on Oct. 20, a passenger kicked in the cockpit door and forced the pilots to fly him to Hamburg.
The FBI is running down some intriguing leads. Before Flight 990 took off from Los Angeles, a crew member complained that his briefcase had been tampered with. After the crash, the FBI dispatched bomb-sniffing dogs to the hotel room, where the canines nosed some coffee and sugar packets that were being analyzed in the FBI labs last week. Investigators were briefly curious about a shipment of “royal jelly” on the cargo manifest, but it turned out to be a liquid produced by bees that is used for Egyptian cosmetics. No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the bombing, at least not credibly. A call from someone claiming to represent a Marxist guerrilla cell in Colombia was traced to Long Island, a suburb of New York City.
The FBI low-keyed the terrorist angle partly for political reasons. When TWA Flight 800 blew up off the coast of Long Island in July 1996, the FBI led the investigation and began hinting heavily at a terrorist bomb. No evidence of foul play ever emerged, and the National Transportation Safety Board finally concluded that the 747’s fuel tank had exploded. The chastened gumshoes are taking a back seat to the NTSB on the Flight 990 investigation.
The Boeing 767 flown by EgyptAir has one of the best safety records in aviation. But its one massive mechanical failure raised questions about the Flight 990 disaster. In May 1991, a 767 operated by a small airline between Hong Kong and Vienna crashed into the jungle of Thailand. When the plane’s cockpit recorder was recovered, one of the pilots was heard exclaiming with an oath (“Jesus Christ!”) that the thrust reverser on the plane’s left engine had unexpectedly opened in flight. The thrust reverser is a braking mechanism in the engine that deflects the jet blast forward rather than backward to help slow the plane on landing. Deployed in midair, it can throw a plane into a fatal plunge.
The 767 that crashed into the Thai jungle was number 283. It came off the Boeing assembly line right after EgyptAir’s 767, number 282. When it was reported last week that the thrust reverser on the left wing of Flight 990 had been disabled because of a mechanical malfunction, reporters, investigators and hungry accident-liability lawyers all began speculating: had a thrust reverser somehow gone haywire and crippled the plane? Possibly. But a Boeing spokesman pointed out that after the Thailand crash, the thrust reverser on all 767s had been improved. And NTSB investigators said privately that if a thrust reverser had suddenly kicked on, the plane would have quickly rolled and turned. On the radar track, it plunged straight down.
The most frightening–but rare–failure haunting the history of the 767 is massive computer breakdown. In 1996, the crew of a 767 operated by Martinair, an affiliate of the Dutch airline KLM, experienced a series of malfunctions that can only be described as bizarre. As the plane, a 767-300ER–the same-generation plane as EgyptAir 990–neared America on a transatlantic flight, the autopilot and the auto-throttle unexpectedly disengaged. The pilots’ flight-management systems began sending emergency messages, unbidden by the crew. Instruments gave conflicting information. On final approach to Boston, warning lights blinked on and off, as did the fasten seat belt sign in the cabin. Using a long runway, the crew managed to bring in the plane safely, despite the failure of some braking systems. When the NTSB and Boeing investigated the incident, they found that some of the computer glitches may have been caused by a loose battery connection.
Investigators were so puzzled by the crash of Flight 990 that they began sifting through the reports of the most freakish accidents. One that caught their attention was the wreck of a nearly new 737 operated by SilkAir, an affiliate of Singapore Airlines, in December 1997. All 104 people aboard perished when the SilkAir jet suddenly dived into a swampy river in Indonesia. At first investigators suspected a malfunction. But last August, an Indonesian government report reached a startlingly different conclusion: a possible suicide by the pilot. A former military-aviation instructor with a history of disciplinary problems, gambling and bad investments, the SilkAir pilot had taken out a large life-insurance policy approved the day before the crash. On one occasion, he had been disciplined for allegedly disconnecting his plane’s voice recorder.
There is no evidence, of course, that Flight 990 was doomed by a suicidal pilot. The black boxes, if recovered from the ocean this week, will, it is hoped, give some indication of what the pilots were saying and doing in their final moments. But it will take months for investigators to pore over EgyptAir’s maintenance and safety records and to try to recover the plane’s wreckage. The investigation will be inevitably slowed by feuding lawyers and turf wars between government bureaucrats. Tense relationships between the airline, the manufacturer, government investigators and the families of victims have bedeviled the search for answers after past crashes. The whole truth may not emerge until responsibility is litigated in a court of law. Or it may have vanished into the dark sea with the passengers and crew of Flight 990.
