Out of Thin Air

By NADYA LABI

Even for sisters, Rania and Soha Rida shared a lot. They were happily planning a joint wedding since each was engaged to an EgyptAir steward. But hours before the EgyptAir Flight 990's fatal crash on Oct. 31, neither of their prospective mates was in a cheery mood. Rania says that in a telephone chat, Hassan Farouk expressed misgivings about the trip, muttering about "technical problems." Soha told an Egyptian weekly that Mohammed Galal was dreading a "very bad flight."

His premonition came disastrously true. Half an hour after lifting off from New York City en route to Cairo, the Boeing 767-300 ER dropped from 33,000 to 16,700 ft. in less than 40 sec., hurtling downward at nearly the speed of sound. For a moment, the plane seemed to catch itself and climbed upward for more than a mile before peeling into a final fatal dive. At 10,000 ft., radar records suggest that the plane broke apart, sprinkling shards of the 767 and its human cargo into the waters off the Massachusetts coast. The wild ride lasted less than two minutes and left behind a slew of puzzling questions. Was the crew alive during those final moments? Did the pilots manage to briefly pull the plane out of its dive, or was the aircraft reflexively entering a climb as the near-supersonic dive increased the lift of its wings? And why were the pilots unable to send out a distress signal?

At the Cairo airport, EgyptAir officials in dark blue suits could do little more than confirm the names of the 217 passengers and crew, among them 62 Egyptians and 106 Americans. "I want to stay at the airport forever," said Hanafi Abdel Fattah, upon learning he had lost his eldest daughter, Walaa. "I cannot go home and face my wife." Other family members immediately accepted EgyptAir's offer to fly them to the U.S. to be close to the recovery efforts. Explained one bewildered relative: "All the information is in America, they say."

Navy vessels equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and seasoned divers struggled to answer what were, initially, unanswerable questions. The Deep Drone, an underwater robot outfitted with sonar and cameras, located the crucial black boxes--the flight-data recorder and cockpit-voice recorders--within days. The flight-data recorder from the 767-300 is a new design that stores 55 measurements of the plane's movements and control inputs--as much as five times more than previous models--that should help investigators piece together what went wrong.

If history is their guide, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) staff will take a hard look at a problematic piece of equipment on the Boeing 767--the thrust reverser. These devices slow the aircraft down during landing by reversing the airflow from the engines. And while the devices are great for shortening landing rolls--or stopping a plane during an aborted takeoff--they can be deadly if accidentally deployed in flight. In 1991 a thrust reverser on a Lauda Air Boeing 767 deployed in midair, sending the plane into a death plunge over Thailand. That jet was No. 283 on Boeing's assembly line. EgyptAir Flight 990 was jet No. 282. In the two months before the crash, the FAA took steps to require airlines to make two fixes in the thrust reversers used on 767 engines, including one to prevent the accidental deployment of a disabled reverser. One of Flight 990's thrust reversers had been deactivated just before the fatal flight.

Despite such speculation, the case for an accidental thrust-reverser deployment is weak, at least for now. When a reverser is accidentally deployed, "one side of the plane is going forward, the other side is going backward," explains Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter. The plane would likely have exhibited the kind of jerky push-pull motion that characterized the Lauda Air jet's descent in 1991. The radar indicates, however, that Flight 990 nosedived in a straight line in its original descent. And if the pilots faced such a problem, they should have had time to send out a distress signal.

Disasters such as TWA Flight 800 have exposed the folly of assuming the worst: terrorism. Still, EgyptAir has a track record: in 1985 Palestinian terrorists hijacked one of its planes to Malta, resulting in 60 deaths, and just three weeks ago, a hijacker forced another plane to fly to Germany. To enhance security, two armed guards usually fly aboard EgyptAir flights. There were no such guards on Flight 990. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak hastened to dismiss sabotage, but the Egyptian government's war against Islamic militants cannot be discounted.

The National Transportation Safety Board is determined to proceed with caution this time, dampening the kind of speculation that flourished after TWA Flight 800 went down. Chairman Jim Hall, who was overshadowed by the FBI in that investigation, has appeared at nearly every press conference, emphasizing the importance of waiting for the facts--and the analysis of the black boxes.

There will probably be no clear verdict for months on what caused the demise of EgyptAir 990. That uncomfortable reality left many seeking explanations that sometimes bordered on the absurd. EgyptAir chairman Mohammed Fahim Rayan seemed ready to subscribe to a "new Bermuda Triangle theory"--namely that there is a curse on aircraft traveling up the Eastern seaboard of the U.S., a graveyard that now contains the remains not only of John F. Kennedy Jr. but also of some of the passengers and crew aboard TWA Flight 800. No less than Mubarak himself seemed taken with the theory, urging the U.S. to investigate "something in the atmosphere, something in the weather." For many, that explanation was better than none at all.

--Reported by Scott Macleod and Amany Radwan/Cairo, Mark Thompson/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles

With reporting by Scott Macleod and Amany Radwan/Cairo, Mark Thompson/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles