| Wall Street Journal | - |
Automated
communication systems on board the missing EgyptAir plane sent a series
of warning messages, including an apparent flight control system fault
and alarms detecting smoke in the nose of the aircraft, according to
people familiar with the matter.
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EgyptAir Flight 804’s Systems Detected Smoke Before It Disappeared
Egypt said it located pieces of the missing Airbus A320 in eastern Mediterranean
Egypt said it has located parts
of the missing EgyptAir plane in the Mediterranean Sea Friday, as the
international search operation intensified. Personal belongings and
plane debris were found 190 miles north of Alexandria, Egypt, said a
military spokesman. Photo: Egyptian Defense Ministry
More
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- Hope Gone, Grieving Begins for Families
- Hunt to Fuel Debate Over Swifter Data to Aid Probes
- Probe Puts New Strain on Egypt
- French Airport Security Gets Fresh Scrutiny
- EgyptAir Investigators Expected to Face Difficult Task
- Probe Likely to Face Constraints of Multinational Effort
The information suggested the plane suffered a series of problems at 2:26 a.m. local time, just before contact with the plane was lost, people familiar with the data said. The aircraft was flying from Paris to Cairo with 66 passengers and crew.
The messages indicate that intense smoke in the front portion of the jetliner set off smoke detectors in the front of the plane where some of its vital electronics are located.
The error messages stretch over a couple of minutes, alerting the crew to smoke detected in the lavatory and under-floor equipment compartment, which sits beneath the cockpit in the nose of the A320 plane. It contains a critical part of the Airbus A320s flight control computer, which the error messages indicate malfunctioned.
Officials involved in the probe who have reviewed the data said the broadcast information by itself is insufficient to determine whether the plane was brought down by a bomb or inexplicable other causes.
Earlier Friday, Egypt said it had located pieces of the missing EgyptAir plane in the eastern Mediterranean, potentially providing the first solid evidence the jetliner had plunged into the sea after swerving wildly and losing contact with flight controllers.
The debris included personal belongings and parts of the Airbus Group SE A320, an Egyptian military spokesman said in Cairo. EgyptAir said later Friday that human remains were also discovered by military search teams 190 miles north of the Egyptian city of Alexandria, confirming earlier reports from Greek officials.
Egypt’s announcement that debris and human remains from the missing plane had been discovered came as the country’s president, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, declared publicly for the first time that the Airbus A320 had crashed. The acknowledgment was made in a statement expressing condolences to relatives of the victims of the tragedy.
Across the Arab world’s most populous country, bereaved relatives of the 30 Egyptians who were among the 66 passengers and crew aboard the plane held special religious services for the missing, as their hopes for a quick recovery of the remains of their loved ones faded.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said there were still no clues to explain why Flight 804 went down. Egyptian officials said the crash was more likely caused by terrorism than technical malfunction, though no group has asserted responsibility for an attack and Egypt has offered no evidence for its belief.
A senior Egyptian aviation official identified the pilot of Flight 804 as Mohamed Saeed Shaqeer, 36, and the co-pilot as Mohamed Ahmed Mamdouh, 24. Neither man had any known political affiliation or history of mental illness, the official said.
“They were young but experienced, especially with this model of airplane, and were well regarded by even more senior pilots,” he said.
EgyptAir Flight 804 went missing
early Thursday morning. Egyptian authorities aren’t ruling out
terrorism. Here’s the timeline of events that Greek officials have
provided for when and where the plane disappeared. WSJ’s Jason Bellini
reports. Image: Getty.
An animation from ship-tracking
website Marinetraffic.com shows the vessels that converged around a
search area on Thursday in the Mediterranean near where EgyptAir Flight
804 is suspected of going down. Photo: Marinetraffic
France sent a special maritime search plane to join French, Greek, British and Egyptian vessels scouring the waters for evidence of the plane, which was flying at 37,000 feet early Thursday when it twisted around, dropped and disappeared from the radar screens of Greek flight controllers.
Planes supplied by the U.S. Navy also participated in the search, which like the official investigation into the crash is being led by Egypt. Airbus said it was also providing satellite imagery.
EgyptAir said the country’s civil aviation authority had formed a committee to investigate the air disaster. The probe is to be led by Capt. Ayman el-Moqadem, the country’s top aviation-accident investigator, who also is heading the multinational panel examining the October crash of a Russian passenger jet in the Sinai Peninsula that killed 224 people. A senior aviation official said finding the EgyptAir plane’s black boxes was a priority.
French air-accident investigators arrived in Cairo to help the Egyptians with the probe, including how to coordinate an underwater search. The team of three investigators and one expert from Airbus were to begin their work on Friday, said a spokeswoman for the French air-accident office, the BEA.
Search teams may face hurdles in salvaging wreckage and the black boxes from the bottom of the Mediterranean, but they are expected to be far less severe than those faced by other deep-sea recovery operations, air-safety experts said.
Teams searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the Boeing Co. 777 plane lost since March 8, 2014 and suspected to have come down in the Indian Ocean, face the prospect that wreckage may be lying at depths of more than 16,000 feet. The Mediterranean’s depth in the region the EgyptAir plane went down is no more than about 11,800 feet, according to Greek officials.
The relative proximity of the likely debris field to the Egyptian coast should also make it easier to sustain a long underwater search, the experts said. The weather should also be less inclement than the often brutal conditions faced by Flight 370 search teams in the southern Indian Ocean.
u.k.
11:09 p.m.
Departs from Charles de Gaulle airport
Paris
ukraine
france
russia
italy
1:24 a.m.
Enters Greek airspace
Path of EgyptAir
Flight 804
spain
1:48 a.m.
Cleared for exit from Greek airspace
turkey
GREECE
2:27 a.m.
Athens
Athens air traffic control gets no response from aircraft
2:29 a.m.
Mediterranean Sea
CRETE
Exits Greek airspace
tunisia
ALGERIA
KARPATHOS
Last position recorded
Egyptian
airspace
Cairo
500 miles
Intended destination
egypt
LIBYA
500 km
Note: Times reflect Paris's time zone, six hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time.
Sources: Flightradar24; Greek Navy; SkyVector
Flight controllers lost the plane’s signal at 2:39 a.m., about 30 minutes before it was due to land in Cairo, when it was 11.5 miles inside Egyptian airspace, the airline and aviation officials said.
In the two days before its disappearance, the plane made round trips from Cairo to Brussels, Tunis and the Eritrean capital Asmara before heading to Paris, according to flight-tracking website Flightradar24.
Hub Traffic
EgyptAir's A320 crisscrossed Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in the days that preceded Flight's 804's disappearance. Investigators are working to reconstruct the plane's final operations to determine if the jet's recent visits were related to the Mediterranean crash.
Outbound
Return
Flights since May 17
Cairo to
Asmara
Cairo to
Tunis
Cairo to
Brussels
Cairo to
Paris
Noon
Noon
May 18
May 17
May 19
BEL
Brussels
Paris
UKRAINE
RUSSIA
FRANCE
Black Sea
TURKEY
Mediterranean
Tunis
Last
position
recorded
TUNISIA
Cairo
ALGERIA
SAUDI
ARABIA
LIBYA
EGYPT
500 miles
SUDAN
ERITRIA
Asmara
500 km
Note: Times reflect Paris's time zone, six hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time.
Source: Flightradar24
In his last public statement in March on the investigation into October’s Metrojet disaster, he said the team was still examining the plane’s maintenance record and reconstructing how the aircraft came apart in midair.
Despite statements by the U.S., the U.K. and Russia that the aircraft had been brought down in an act of terrorism and a claim of responsibility by Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate, Capt. Moqadem said in December there was no evidence of foul play.
Two months later, Mr. Sisi, the Egyptian president, said terrorists seeking to damage Egyptian-Russian relations were to blame for crash.
Capt. Moqadem couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Friday.
—Nicholas Winning in London and Jon Ostrower contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications: The Mediterranean’s depth where the EgyptAir plane went down, according to Greek officials, is no more than 3,600 meters. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the depth of the Mediterranean at that location is no more than 3,600 feet. A subsequent version of the article incorrectly gave two different approximations of the conversion from meters to feet, as 11,000 and 11,800. The conversion of 3,600 meters is approximately 11,800 feet. (May 20, 2016)
