Authorities piecing together what happened to the doomed EgyptAir Flight 804 will get the support of a submarine as they continue their search for data records and more debris.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi ordered the expansion of the search five days after the Airbus A320 went down over the Mediterranean Sea en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board. France's accident investigator, BEA, said over the weekend the plane generated automatic radio messages about smoke in the front portion of the cabin minutes before disappearing. The electronic signals offer a puzzling twist to what may have happened to the flight, which crashed about 290 kilometres (180 miles) off the Egyptian coast. Two error messages, the first at 2:26 a.m. local time, suggested a fire on board, while later alerts indicated some type of failure in the plane's electrical equipment, BEA said Saturday.
El-Sisi, in a televised speech on Sunday, warned against jumping to conclusions about why the aircraft fell from the sky. He said a submarine belonging to the Oil Ministry would help in the search, which now focuses on retrieving the aircraft's voice and data recorders, known as black boxes despite their bright orange colour.
Ehab Azmy, the head of Egypt's National Air Navigation Services, denied a report by French television channel M6, saying there had been no contact with Egyptian air control authorities before the plane disappeared. Citing unidentified French aviation officials, M6 reported that the pilot had a conversation "several minutes long" with Cairo control about the smoke in parts of the aircraft and decided to make an emergency descent to clear the fumes.
Egypt Tourism
The investigation is critical for Egypt, whose tourism industry suffered a major blow after a Russian passenger jet crashed in the Sinai peninsula in October. Islamic State took credit for that crash, even as Egyptian investigators have resisted ascribing it to terrorism pending the completion of the probe. There have been no claims of responsibility from any militant group in the case of Flight 804.
A search and rescue personnel looks out the window of a U.S. patrol aircraft searching the area in the Mediterranean Sea.
A search and rescue personnel looks out the window of a U.S. patrol aircraft searching the area in the Mediterranean Sea. Photographer: Salvatore Cavalli/AP Photo
The few clues that have surfaced so far from the wreckage offer no clear direction. The initial investigation report will be released in a month, Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper reported, citing probe head Ayman El-Mokadem.
While signals like those from the EgyptAir plane have preceded air accidents in the past, the warnings aren't associated with a sudden disappearance from radar as occurred with the Airbus A320 over the Mediterranean. A Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over Ukrainian airspace in July 2014 broke apart so quickly that on-board systems didn't have time to send distress messages.
"It's too long for an explosion and too short for a traditional fire," said John Cox, a former A320 pilot who is president of the Washington-based consultancy Safety Operating Systems. "It says we have more questions than we have answers."
Spanning three minutes, the warnings were followed by alerts that fumes were detected by smoke detectors, one in a lavatory and the other in the compartment below the cockpit where the plane's computers and avionics systems are stored, according to the Aviation Herald.
In the case of a mid-flight fire, the pilots would have been expected to radio a distress call and begin attempts to divert, Cox said.
The transmissions, which are automatically sent to ground stations so airlines can monitor whether a plane needs maintenance, will probably provide valuable clues once they're matched up against the plane's crash-proof flight recorders.
El-Mokadem said the cockpit voice and flight-data recorders had not been found, refuting a CBS News report on Saturday that they had been located. It took salvage crews years to locate and recover the devices from the Air France AF447 flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. Malaysian Airlines MH370 still hasn't been found more than two years after it disappeared.
Debris Images
Debris from EgyptAir Flight 804.
Debris from EgyptAir Flight 804. Source: Anadolu Agency/Getty Imagess
Egypt's army has released both images and video footage of Flight 804 debris that show an intact yellow life jacket lying beside wrecked seat cushioning, tattered clothes and EgyptAir-branded metal plane parts, quashing hopes of finding any survivors.
The condition of those remains and the way debris was found scattered may offer some clues about how the plane went down, with a wide field of small pieces pointing to a mid-air breakup. Large chunks of wreckage might suggest the aircraft hit the water largely intact.
The flight lost contact in the middle of the night in the wider area of the Strabo trench in the so-called Hellenic Arc in the seas south of Greece. Waters there are as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) deep, complicating search efforts.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi ordered the expansion of the search five days after the Airbus A320 went down over the Mediterranean Sea en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board. France's accident investigator, BEA, said over the weekend the plane generated automatic radio messages about smoke in the front portion of the cabin minutes before disappearing. The electronic signals offer a puzzling twist to what may have happened to the flight, which crashed about 290 kilometres (180 miles) off the Egyptian coast. Two error messages, the first at 2:26 a.m. local time, suggested a fire on board, while later alerts indicated some type of failure in the plane's electrical equipment, BEA said Saturday.
El-Sisi, in a televised speech on Sunday, warned against jumping to conclusions about why the aircraft fell from the sky. He said a submarine belonging to the Oil Ministry would help in the search, which now focuses on retrieving the aircraft's voice and data recorders, known as black boxes despite their bright orange colour.
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"All scenarios are open," El-Sisi said in his first public comments since the Thursday disaster that has so far not provided any obvious explanation. "It's important that we don't assume that a certain scenario happened."
Ehab Azmy, the head of Egypt's National Air Navigation Services, denied a report by French television channel M6, saying there had been no contact with Egyptian air control authorities before the plane disappeared. Citing unidentified French aviation officials, M6 reported that the pilot had a conversation "several minutes long" with Cairo control about the smoke in parts of the aircraft and decided to make an emergency descent to clear the fumes.
Egypt Tourism
The investigation is critical for Egypt, whose tourism industry suffered a major blow after a Russian passenger jet crashed in the Sinai peninsula in October. Islamic State took credit for that crash, even as Egyptian investigators have resisted ascribing it to terrorism pending the completion of the probe. There have been no claims of responsibility from any militant group in the case of Flight 804.
A search and rescue personnel looks out the window of a U.S. patrol aircraft searching the area in the Mediterranean Sea.
A search and rescue personnel looks out the window of a U.S. patrol aircraft searching the area in the Mediterranean Sea. Photographer: Salvatore Cavalli/AP Photo
The few clues that have surfaced so far from the wreckage offer no clear direction. The initial investigation report will be released in a month, Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper reported, citing probe head Ayman El-Mokadem.
While signals like those from the EgyptAir plane have preceded air accidents in the past, the warnings aren't associated with a sudden disappearance from radar as occurred with the Airbus A320 over the Mediterranean. A Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over Ukrainian airspace in July 2014 broke apart so quickly that on-board systems didn't have time to send distress messages.
"It's too long for an explosion and too short for a traditional fire," said John Cox, a former A320 pilot who is president of the Washington-based consultancy Safety Operating Systems. "It says we have more questions than we have answers."
Spanning three minutes, the warnings were followed by alerts that fumes were detected by smoke detectors, one in a lavatory and the other in the compartment below the cockpit where the plane's computers and avionics systems are stored, according to the Aviation Herald.
In the case of a mid-flight fire, the pilots would have been expected to radio a distress call and begin attempts to divert, Cox said.
The transmissions, which are automatically sent to ground stations so airlines can monitor whether a plane needs maintenance, will probably provide valuable clues once they're matched up against the plane's crash-proof flight recorders.
El-Mokadem said the cockpit voice and flight-data recorders had not been found, refuting a CBS News report on Saturday that they had been located. It took salvage crews years to locate and recover the devices from the Air France AF447 flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. Malaysian Airlines MH370 still hasn't been found more than two years after it disappeared.
Debris Images
Debris from EgyptAir Flight 804.
Debris from EgyptAir Flight 804. Source: Anadolu Agency/Getty Imagess
Egypt's army has released both images and video footage of Flight 804 debris that show an intact yellow life jacket lying beside wrecked seat cushioning, tattered clothes and EgyptAir-branded metal plane parts, quashing hopes of finding any survivors.
The condition of those remains and the way debris was found scattered may offer some clues about how the plane went down, with a wide field of small pieces pointing to a mid-air breakup. Large chunks of wreckage might suggest the aircraft hit the water largely intact.
The flight lost contact in the middle of the night in the wider area of the Strabo trench in the so-called Hellenic Arc in the seas south of Greece. Waters there are as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) deep, complicating search efforts.