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Decoding EgyptAir
The National Transportation Safety Board is waiting on a final analysis of the cockpit voice recorder of Flight 990 before turning over the investigation to the FBI.
By Fiona Morgan
[11/15/99]

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[11/15/99]

Emergency in the cockpit
The Web goes wild for EgyptAir facts, analysis and conspiracy theories.
By Fiona Morgan
[11/12/99]

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Pilots and investigators held high hopes for that voice recorder, expecting it to explain the many problems of this crash. Early flight data hinted at some sort of pilot-induced cause, a possible intentional crash. But the 30 minutes of recorded casual chatter only makes the mystery murkier.

Also Today Decoding EgyptAir A team of experts is analyzing the cockpit voice recorder of Flight 990, but will investigators need more pieces of the plane to determine what brought it down? By Fiona Morgan

Were these guys just terrific actors, brilliant saboteurs who played the game all the way to the ground? It's doubtful, when they simply could have disabled the voice recorder, as an apparently suicidal pilot on Singaporean carrier Silkair did before pointing the nose of his 737 straight down in 1997, killing all aboard.

As a pilot myself, I was convinced that the voice recorder would reveal a frantic cockpit battle as one pilot struggled to save his craft while the other fought to nose in. I believed it not because of erroneous newspaper reports about how the recovered control surfaces pointed in opposite directions, which led "experts" to conclude that the pilots must have been wrestling over the yoke.

Wrong -- the controls are linked, and when one pilot pulls harder to the right, both yokes point that way. Nothing but severed control lines (or possibly, on the 767, frozen controls) will make those ailerons and stabilizers disagree. If in fact the controls were crossed, that only adds another awkward piece to the puzzle.

The reason I believed the battling-pilot theory was because of the disconnection of the autopilot -- the first of many mysteries about this crash. The plane was cruising, set up for a long overseas flight, the autopilot calmly tracking the radio beacons and holding altitude. It's common airline procedure to hand the flight over to autopilot shortly after taking off, and very unusual that someone would turn it off until landing. One reason would be if the plane decompressed, as Payne Stewart's Learjet apparently did. Procedure is for pilots, who have seconds to live at that altitude, to put on oxygen masks, disconnect the autopilot and quickly descend to 10,000 feet.

But if they were working together to solve such a problem, the pilots certainly would have called air controllers, which is the second mystery: Why was there no communication with controllers? A commercial pilot on an overseas flight plan can talk to a radar controller at any time by simply pushing a small button on the airplane's control yoke, then speaking into his headset's microphone. It's a one-finger operation, easily performed while flying.

Surely one of the two or three people in that cockpit had a second to push the button and say, "Uh, New York, we've got a little problem here." The plane dived for 40 seconds, each of them surely seeming like minutes.

Admittedly, pilots are trained to fly first, talk second. Yakking to air traffic control isn't going to save a falling plane, which would demand a pilot's full attention. But in 40 seconds of diving and a few of climbing, didn't at least one crew member have a moment to radio in an emergency call?

The third mystery is how and why the engines were shut down. Airplane engines aren't turned off by keys but by cutting off the fuel supply -- which may have happened just before this airplane climbed. Recovering from a steep dive puts tremendous pressure on the airframe, which can actually yank off the wings and tail. Pilots familiar with the plane say there is no operating handbook procedure for a Boeing 767 recovery from a descent as steep as this one made.

But the first step in any dive recovery is to reduce air speed, which means reducing power. Is it possible that one of the pilots, in a frantic attempt to slow the machine down before pulling the nose up, instead cut the engines completely? The two procedures are difficult to confuse, so it's almost certain that the pilot intended to turn the power plants off. And then climb? It is possible, but unlikely, pilots say, that a Boeing 767 could gain 8,000 feet without power.

Next page | Learning from "pilot error"