Authorities piecing together what happened to the doomed EgyptAir Flight 804 will receive the support of a submarine as they continue their search for data records and more debris.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi ordered the expansion of the search five days after the Airbus A320 went down over the Mediterranean Sea en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board.
France’s air accident investigation agency, BEA, on Saturday said that the plane generated automatic radio messages about smoke in the front portion of the cabin minutes before disappearing.
The electronic signals offer a puzzling twist to what might have happened to the flight, which crashed about 290km off the Egyptian coast. Two error messages, the first at 2:26am local time, suggested a fire on board, while later alerts indicated some type of failure in the plane’s electrical equipment, BEA said.
In a televised speech on Sunday, el-Sisi warned against jumping to conclusions about why the aircraft fell from the sky. He said a submarine belonging to the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum would help in the search, which now focuses on retrieving the aircraft’s voice and data recorders, known as black boxes.
“All scenarios are open,” el-Sisi said in his first public comments since the disaster on Thursday last week that has so far not provided any obvious explanation.
“It’s important that we don’t assume that a certain scenario happened,” he added.
Ehab Azmy, the head of Egypt’s National Air Navigation Services, denied a report by French television channel M6, saying there had been no contact with Egyptian air control authorities before the plane disappeared.
Citing unidentified French aviation officials, M6 reported that the pilot had a conversation “several minutes long” with Cairo control about the smoke in parts of the aircraft and decided to make an emergency descent to clear the fumes.
The investigation is critical for Egypt, whose tourism industry suffered a major blow after a Russian passenger jet crashed in the Sinai Peninsula in October last year. The Islamic State group took credit for that crash, even as Egyptian investigators have resisted ascribing it to terrorism pending the completion of the probe. There have been no claims of responsibility from any militant group in the case of Flight 804.
The few clues that have surfaced so far from the wreckage offer no clear direction. The initial investigation report is scheduled to be released in a month, Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram newspaper reported, citing investigation head Ayman el-Mokadem.
While signals like those from the EgyptAir plane have preceded air accidents in the past, the warnings are not associated with a sudden disappearance from radar as occurred with the Airbus A320 over the Mediterranean.
A Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over Ukrainian airspace in July 2014 broke apart so quickly that on-board systems did not have time to send distress messages.
“It’s too long for an explosion and too short for a traditional fire,” said John Cox, a former A320 pilot who is president of the Washington-based consultancy Safety Operating Systems. “It says we have more questions than we have answers.”
Spanning three minutes, the warnings were followed by alerts that fumes were detected by smoke detectors, one in a lavatory and the other in the compartment below the cockpit where the plane’s computers and avionics systems are stored, according to the Aviation Herald.
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