EgyptAir disaster answers may be very near
Egypt, Local, 11/12/1999

More flight recorder data was made available today about the EgyptAir flight 990 that fell mysteriously from the sky shortly after leaving the New Yok J.F.K. airport.

NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said today that additional data have been obtained from the flight data recorder (so-called black box), and that five more seconds remain to be recovered. He indicated that the flight data reveal that the path taken by the plane was not a free fall descent, but rather a "controlled" descent, implying that the plane was being piloted during this period. A potential implication of this fact is that it is likely that the voice recorder that has not been recovered yet, if intact, may contain voice data from the pilots or the plane's environment that will give the clues needed to investigators to solve this puzzle.

Hall said the plane fell at speeds of 0.86 Mach speed and that a "master warning" was activated. A "master warning" is activated he said when a plane exceeds 0.9 Mach speeds, or if the autopilot is deactivated improperly, or if the plane had improper landing or take -off, or if the plane lost cabin pressure.

Hall added that the plane while descending had its engine levers switched from start to cutoff confirming that the plane's engines shutdown during the descent.

The NTSB chairman said "the data raises many questions," but hoped to have good news soon on the recovery of the voice recorder. Efforts are now underway to recover the voice recorder. He said there are six Egyptian investigators looking into the incident in the US, but it was not clear if they were on site, and had immediate access to recovered items.

The Egyptian plane was carrying multinational passengers, mostly Egyptians and Americans, and they included 33 Egyptian Army officers on their return home from military training operations in the US, in addition to eight outstanding experts in the petroleum industry, which has raised allegations in Egyptian circles that this accident was an intentional act to get rid of these specialized Egyptians.

Meantime, Egyptian sources told ArabicNews.com that there is a high average occupation ratio for the airplanes of the EgyptAir company on all trips, especially from Egyptian passengers (who always complain of the bad service of EgyptAir).

Previous Stories:
  Preliminary data on EgyptAir crash yields few answers   (11/11/1999)
  Egyptian plane black boxes found   (11/2/1999)
  Latest on EgyptAir crash   (11/1/1999)

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