EgyptAir flight disappearance sparks search for debris, questions about cause
Debris field could help investigators determine what happened to flight 804
Officials are being guarded in their assessments of what might have happened to EgyptAir flight 804 before it disappeared from radar over the Mediterranean Sea early Thursday with 66 people on board, including two Canadians.
No cause is being ruled out, but Egypt's civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathy, has speculated that the plane was brought down deliberately, saying a "terror attack" was a more likely cause than a technical failure.
While investigators search for answers, aviation experts have focused on the plane's unusual actions just prior to losing contact.
The plane left Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport at 11:09 p.m. local time. Shortly after it entered Egyptian airspace, it "turned 90 degrees left and then a 360-degree turn toward the right, dropping from 38,000 to 15,000 feet [about 11,580 metres to 4,570 metres] and then it was lost at about 10,000 feet [3,050 metres]," according to Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos.
"Those are interesting manoeuvres for an airplane to take if it's had some sort of mechanical failure because they're opposite manoeuvres in opposite directions," Ottawa-based aviation consultant Ted Lennox told CBC News Network on Thursday afternoon.
"A full 360-degree turn, especially a steep turn at altitude, could cause the aircraft to have an aerodynamic stall, and that would cause the rapid descent and the dropping of the airplane — all of this indicative of perhaps interference in the cockpit as one potential cause," said Lennox, who has 35 years' experience in the industry.
Lennox said officials have to be open to all possibilities during an investigation, but added that the "time and location" in the plane's disappearance make the EgyptAir case "very, very suspicious."
'Something catastrophic' happened
A former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board member said early indications point more to a bomb than to a structural or mechanical failure in this case.
"Given the fact that [the pilot] made those abrupt turns without broadcasting any maydays would indicate to me that something catastrophic, like a device, happened," John Goglia told The Associated Press.
He said a mechanical failure or a structural failure, like a piece of the airplane's aluminum skin ripping away, were both possible but less likely.
A Manitoba pilot whose friend was the man believed to be a co-pilot on flight 804 says he hopes the plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder will shed light on what happened — but they have to be found first.
"Basically we have a lot of options to go through," Mostafa Ezzo told CBC's As It Happens on Thursday. "First of all, we have the transponder, a device that sends and receives radio signals, so the air traffic controller can identify the position of the aircraft. It vanished from the radar. The possibility here is the transponder went off. How it went off? That we don't know."
Ezzo, a regional jet pilot based in Winnipeg, said 24-year-old Mohamed Mamdouh was one of his best friends. They went to flight school together in Egypt.
"He was a funny person, always jokes, and he works very hard," Ezzo said, adding Mamdouh was an experienced flyer who had clocked about 3,000 hours behind the controls.
The plane's abrupt turns, if they happened as described, are "very hard to explain," Ezzo said. "The only possibility that I can guess in this situation is an engine fire or a wing fire."
Lennox says the timing and location of the plane's drop out of the sky is suspicious but that the debris field could also tell investigators a lot.
"Is it a tight field, which would indicate the aircraft went in vertically? Is it a very spread out debris field, which would suggest an aircraft coming apart in flight?" Lennox said. "And then the length of the field, and then of course the debris — one looks at the chemical composition of the debris."
But a probe involving multiple agencies from multiple jurisdictions is complicated — in more ways than one.
"You have the political as well as the scientific and technical investigations," he said. "Sometimes there are considerations beyond the pure technical that come into play. In this case, I'm not sure the total story will come out very quickly."
With files from As It Happens and The Associated Press