Egypt Air Flight 990

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Egypt Air Flight 990
Egyptair Boeing 767-300 in 1992-CN.jpg

The unlucky machine in 1992
Accident summary
Accident type Pilot suicide or crash due to component failure
place Atlantic Ocean
date October 31, 1999
Fatalities 217
Survivors 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type Boeing 767-366ER
operator Egypt Air
Mark SU-GAP
Departure airport Los Angeles International Airport
Stopover John F. Kennedy International Airport
Destination airport Cairo International Airport
Passengers 202
crew 15th
Lists of aviation accidents

On October 31, 1999, a Boeing 767-366ER crashed on Egypt Air flight 990 ( flight number : MS990 or MSR990). The Egypt Air plane , which was to make an international scheduled flight from Los Angeles via New York City to Cairo , crashed about 360 kilometers east of New York into the Atlantic Ocean , killing all 217 people on board. The cause of the accident could not be conclusively clarified. The US NTSB considered a pilot suicide likely, while the Egyptian Aviation Authority assumed a loss of control as a result of an elevator defect.

Aircraft and crew

Nationalities
country people
United StatesUnited States United States 100
EgyptEgypt Egypt 89
CanadaCanada Canada 21st
SyriaSyria Syria 3
SudanSudan Sudan 2
ZimbabweZimbabwe Zimbabwe 1
GermanyGermany Germany 1

The Boeing 767-366ER with the registration number SU-GAP was delivered by Boeing to Egypt Air on September 26, 1989. The airline operated it continuously for ten years and two months until the crash. In their operating time with two graduated & - - Whitney PW4060 Pratt - engines equipped machine a total of 33,354 flight hours. On flight MS990, the thrust reverser of the left engine was deactivated because it was defective.

15 Egypt Air employees were deployed on flight MS990. This included a flight engineer , ten flight attendants and, due to the long flight time of around ten hours, two groups of pilots. Both had a captain and a first officer. One flight crew was responsible for take-off and landing , while the other, who was supposed to replace the first after about three to four hours, was responsible for the middle flight segment.

There were 202 passengers on board. The majority of them were from the United States and Egypt. The rest came from five other states; among them was a person from Germany.

Flight sequence

Graphic of the flight sequence shortly before the impact on the Atlantic. The aircraft quickly loses almost half its altitude before briefly rising again.

Egypt Air flight 990 took off on October 30, 1999 from Los Angeles International Airport to Cairo with a scheduled stopover at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport . There the machine landed at 11:48 p.m. ( UTC-4 ) and reached the gate about 20 minutes later, where the crew changed and the two crews boarded for the transatlantic flight.

Egypt Air Flight 990 was at 01:19 am, the start permission for the rail 22R for the flight from New York to Cairo. The first crew started the flight. But just 20 minutes after take-off, the first officer of the replacement crew, Gamil El-Batouti, came into the cockpit and stubbornly insisted on taking over the first part of the flight. At that time El-Batouti was the oldest first officer of Egypt Air and was about to retire, which is why the first copilot made room. When the captain went to the toilet at around 1:48 a.m. , El-Batouti was alone in the cockpit. Then he turned off the engines and the autopilot 100 seconds after the captain had left the cockpit , whereupon the nose of the Boeing 767-366ER, which was already at cruising altitude of 10,000 meters, moved heavily lowered and the machine went into a steep dive , which made the aircraft weightless . At 1:50:06 a.m., Captain Mahmoud El Habashy came back into the cockpit when the machine had already exceeded the maximum flight speed of Mach 0.86  and crashed to the ground with a negative load multiple at around 99 percent of the speed of sound . El Habashy tried to intercept the plane by pulling the control stick , but failed. Even with the engines, the dive could not be ended because they were switched off. Only with the wing flaps was El Habashy able to reduce speed and intercept the dive after 40 seconds at an altitude of 5,000 meters. Because the engines were switched off, the power went out , which is why the flight data recorder and voice recorder could no longer record anything, so that it is no longer possible to determine with certainty what exactly was happening on board. However, the radar records determined that the aircraft rose again to 7,300 meters. It lost too much speed due to a lack of engine power, which is why it again went into a rapid nosedive. Parts of the fuselage and the left engine tore off before the Boeing 767 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean at around 01:52 a.m.

Rescue and recovery

Two US Coast Guard ships search for survivors at the crash site

The rescue operation in the Atlantic Ocean began about 20 minutes after the crash. The American Coast Guard was alerted at 02:15 a.m. that a Boeing 767 had disappeared. The Kings Pointer , a training ship of the US Merchant Marine (United States Merchant Marine) , first met one on the scene. Your crew found traces of oil and debris on the surface of the water at dawn . Due to the heavy impact, no one had survived the crash. The salvage of the rubble, which was scattered over 104  km 2 and needed to clear up the accident, turned out to be difficult. The depth of the water also hindered the recovery of the flight recorders. The acoustic location beacons , called "pingers", were separated from the black boxes on impact. It was only nine days after the accident that an unmanned submarine of the US Navy discovered the flight data recorder; another four days later on November 14, 1999, the voice recorder was also found.

In addition to nine coastguard boats, an airplane and three helicopters took part in the search for survivors and the recovery of the wreckage.

The rescue operation ended on December 22nd, 1999. 70 percent of the aircraft could be recovered. In the western area ( 40 ° 20 ′ 57 ″  N , 69 ° 45 ′ 40 ″  W ) mainly parts of the left engine, the two wings, the skin of the fuselage and the horizontal stabilizer and large pieces of the nose landing gear were found, in the eastern area ( 40 ° 20 ′ 51 ″  N , 69 ° 45 ′ 24 ″  W ) Parts of the fuselage, the wings, the tail unit with the right engine and the main landing gear, as well as the flight recorder.

In a further, but much shorter search operation from March 29 to April 3, 2000, parts of the left engine were found in addition to various parts of the wreckage.

Accident investigation

Start of investigation

The voice recorder was recovered 13 days after the accident. His evaluation brought to light discrepancies among the pilots.

Shortly after the second black box was recovered, American investigators at the headquarters of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) began translating the Arabic conversations recorded by the voice recorder. This wasn't a big problem because of the good sound quality; nevertheless it did not get the investigators any further at first. The FBI , which supported the NTSB in the investigation of the accident, quickly found out that it could not have been a bomb attack because neither remains of explosives were found nor the destruction pattern of the debris matched a bomb. The evaluation of the flight data recorder also showed no abnormalities. A technical defect or a pilot's error were now considered as further causes of the crash .

Explanation of the dive

When comparing the recordings of the voice recorder with the information from the flight data recorder, the investigators discovered inconsistencies. Gamil El-Batouti, who had already appeared in the cockpit before his actual working hours, switched off the autopilot, causing the aircraft to sink and turn to the left. Then he pushed the control stick forward and the throttle back, which reduced the engine thrust and deflected the elevator down.

According to American investigators, after getting back into the cockpit, the captain tried to catch the dive by pulling the control stick. That didn't help, however, as the first officer kept pushing the stick. It was only with the help of the wing flaps that hope of saving the aircraft seemed to arise again. Since it was now gaining altitude again, but no engine thrust accelerated it, it became too slow, which is why the machine fell uncontrollably into the Atlantic Ocean.

However, the Egyptian authorities developed a different theory. Because three broken rivets of the horizontal stabilizer were discovered among the wreckage found , they assumed a failure of the elevator. So one rudder was pointing up while the other was pointing down. Informed by the Egyptians, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered all bell crank rivets in all Boeing 767s to be examined. 136 defective rivets were found in 34 aircraft. The Egyptian investigators were now certain that the broken rivets had jammed the horizontal stabilizer, causing the aircraft, which could no longer be steered, to crash.

The Americans, based on the NTSB, did not share this opinion. They pointed out that a Boeing 767 has independently functioning elevators in order to keep control of the other if one rudder fails. During a flight simulator test it was found that the captain, with his measures and in his situation, could have intercepted the aircraft without major problems. In this way they questioned the Egyptian theory and finally ruled out both technical failure and a terrorist attack.

suicide

The NTSB then focused on the first officer. The expression "I trust in Allah " , which is otherwise used in a positive sense, came from him . Although this phrase is usually not unusual, El-Batouti repeated it eleven times. That caught the attention of the Americans. It was this suspicious behavior that led the NTSB to refer the case to the FBI , despite the Egyptians' displeasure .

The FBI began its investigation at the New York Hotel Pennsylvania , where Egypt Air housed its staff. There it learned that El-Batouti repeatedly committed sexual misconduct and harassed female guests and hotel staff. He had already become suspicious of sexual harassment two years earlier. El-Batouti was also alleged to be frustrated and angry with Egypt Air because he was about to retire and still had not gotten above the rank of first officer.

Three months after the FBI investigation began, another Egypt Air pilot named Taha called in London. He asked for political asylum in the UK and claimed to know something about the Egypt Air 990 crash, but he was subjected to repression in Egypt . An FBI agent and an employee of the British secret service questioned the pilot. Taha reported that Egypt Air was aware of El-Batouti's sexual dysfunction but was ignored. Only on the day before the accident did the lead pilot speak to the first officer and explain to him that his behavior could no longer be tolerated and that Flight 990 would be his last flight in American airspace. This gave US investigators another motive for pilot suicide .

Captain Taha also revealed that all of Egypt Air's flight crews had been ordered to meet in Cairo. There it should only be made clear to them with technical facts that it was a technical error that ultimately led to the crash. However, it was clear to all those present from the explanations that it must have been a pilot's error. At the conference, Egypt Air insisted that the crews maintain absolute silence about the case and all contexts.

The Egyptian authorities then had another Egypt Air pilot interrogated. Mohammed Dabrahi, a long-time friend of El-Batouti, confirmed that the lead pilot had known about the sexual misconduct for some time, but had previously ignored it. This was due to the fact that the first officer was about to retire. Dabrahi stated that there was no conversation with El-Batouti because of this.

Causes of accidents

Official investigation results

The aircraft accident investigations extended over two years and five months and resulted in costs of ten million dollars (about 8.2 million euros ). The NTSB published its final report on March 21, 2002. It says, among other things, that the accident probably resulted from the misconduct of the first officer of the replacement crew. The then angry Egyptians criticized this thesis and the work of the NTSB.

The evidence determined to date does not represent absolute proof of the actual course of the accident. What exactly happened on board and for what reasons could never be fully clarified.

Comparison of the process from the point of view of the United States and Egypt

United States Egypt
El-Batouti manually switches off the autopilot. El-Batouti switched off the autopilot because it had a technical problem.
El-Batouti initiates a steep descent by operating the elevator. The horizontal stabilizer jams and this creates the dive.
He actively interrupts the fuel supply to the two engines. The engines shut down and the thrust required for lift decreases rapidly. He does this out of caution. The master had ordered the engines to be restarted after the oil pressure warning system lights up, which indicates that the engines have failed.
El-Batouti pushes the stick forward while the captain does the opposite. This means that one elevator points up and the other down. This further provokes the dive, the machine begins to roll uncontrollably in the dive. El-Batouti pushes the control stick forward. Together with the captain, he wants to stabilize the machine, which has become uncontrollable due to the jammed elevator.
Ultimately, after a short climb of almost 2,500 meters, which the Boeing took too much speed, the aircraft crashed back towards the sea and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

MS990 in the context of other Egyptian aircraft accident investigations

Flight 990 is now one of a series of incidents in which, in the course of multinational aircraft accident investigations, a controversy has arisen between Egyptian investigators and the investigative group cooperating with them:

  • On October 31, 2015, an Airbus A321-200 on Kogalymavia flight 9268 crashed into a desert area on the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 occupants. On the same day, Wilayat Sinai , the Egyptian branch of the Islamic State , admitted to deliberately causing the plane crash in retaliation for Russia's intervention in the Syrian war and posted fuzzy, unverified video footage online showing an airplane exploding in flight was seen. The Russian aviation safety authority confirmed a day later that the Airbus had broken up in the air, and the head of the FSB , Alexander Bortnikov , declared on November 17 that there was no doubt that an explosives attack was the cause of the crash. Regardless of these circumstances, Egyptian investigators attributed the crash to a technical defect very early on and maintained their thesis for months, probably in fear of negative consequences for the tourism industry in the country, until they finally joined the attack thesis on February 24, 2016.
  • On May 19, 2016, an Airbus A320-200 crashed on Egypt Air Flight 804 from Paris to Cairo in the Mediterranean Sea shortly after entering Egyptian airspace. All 66 people on board were killed in the crash. The Egyptian investigators said in December 2016 that they had found traces of explosives on the bodies of the passengers and declared an attack on the machine as the cause of the crash. Almost a year after the crash, the French investigators of the BEA rejected the attack thesis and suspected a fire in the cockpit as a result of an exploded tablet and a subsequent loss of control. The Egyptian investigators upheld their attack hypothesis for another year before joining the BEA theory. A final report on the incident has not yet been published; the BEA criticizes the opaque and poorly cooperative way of working of its Egyptian colleagues.

filming

The crash of the Boeing 767 on Egypt Air Flight 990 was directed by Michael Douglas based on the script Andrew Weir in the eighth episode of the third season of the Canadian television series Mayday - Alarm im Cockpit with the original English title Death and Denial and the German one Track crash shown by Egyptair 990 . In simulated scenes, animations and interviews with bereaved relatives and investigators, reports were made about the preparations, the process and the background of the flight.

See also

literature

  • Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook: The Crash of EgyptAir 990 . In: Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, Nicholas Pileggi (eds.): Best American Crime Reporting 2002 . Vintage, 2002, ISBN 978-0-375-71299-9 , pp. 217 ff . (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • Opinion Research Service (US): American public opinion index . tape 1 . Opinion Research Service, 1999, p. 531 ff . (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).

Web links

Commons : Egypt-Air-Flug 990  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Factual . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 1 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  2. ↑ a b Aircraft accident data and report in the Aviation Safety Network (English)
  3. ↑ a b Jim Hall, Chairman: August 8 speech. NTSB , August 11, 2000, accessed July 4, 2010 .
  4. ↑ a b Airplane information . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 1 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  5. ↑ Airfleets.net: Egyptair SU-GAP (Boeing 767). Retrieved May 13, 2010 .
  6. ↑ a b c d e Ulrich Jaeger: Airplane Disaster: Mourning in the Heartbreak Hotel . In: Der Spiegel . No. 45 , 1999 ( online ).
  7. ↑ Personnel information . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 7 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  8. ^ History of flight . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 2 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  9. ↑ Donna Abu-Nasr: Despair in Cairo: “We have relatives on this flight”. Spiegel Online , October 31, 1999, accessed May 15, 2010 .
  10. ↑ a b History of flight . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 5 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  11. ↑ a b c Holger Dambeck: Flight recorder data: Difficult search for the black box. Spiegel Online , June 2, 2009, accessed May 15, 2010 .
  12. ^ History Of Flight . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 4 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  13. ↑ a b c d After a plane crash: the EgyptAir machine's voice recorder found. Spiegel Online , November 14, 1999, accessed May 15, 2010 .
  14. ↑ a b c d Flight Egypt Air 990: The last seconds in the cockpit. Spiegel Online , November 17, 1999, accessed May 15, 2010 .
  15. ^ History Of Flight . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 6 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  16. ↑ Air crash: Missing machine crashed off the US coast. Spiegel Online , October 31, 1999, accessed May 15, 2010 .
  17. ↑ a b c After the plane crash: search for survivors stopped. Spiegel Online , November 1, 1999, accessed May 15, 2010 .
  18. ↑ a b Wreckage information . In: NTSB (Ed.): Aircraft Accident Brief of EgyptAir Flight 990 . Washington, DC March 31, 2002, p. 34 (English, ntsb.gov [PDF]).
  19. ↑ Cause of the crash: Voice recorder does not provide any information. Spiegel Online , November 15, 1999, accessed May 15, 2010 .
  20. ↑ https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2018/07/14/what-really-happened-to-egyptair-flight-804
  21. ↑ https://investigativ.welt.de/2015/11/01/terroranschlag-auf-flug-7k9268-in-aeggypt/
  22. ↑ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-crash-islamic-state/islamic-state-claims-responsibility-for-russian-plane-crash-in-egypt-idUSKCN0SP0P520151031
  23. ↑ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/isis-plane-attack-egypt-terrorists-downed-russian-metrojet-flight-from-sharm-el-sheikh-islamic-state-a6893181 .html
  24. ↑ EgyptAir flight 804: plane crashed after a fire in the cockpit? In: Spiegel Online . July 7, 2018, accessed October 7, 2018 .
  25. ↑ Internet Movie Database : "Mayday" Death and Denial. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 14, 2012 ; Retrieved May 15, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.imdb.de

Coordinates: 40 ° 21 ′  N , 69 ° 45 ′  W