Black box 'rules out terror'
20/01/2004 15:04 - (SA)
Cairo - Egyptian and French investigators studying the flight data recorders of an Egyptian plane that crashed into the Red Sea said on Tuesday they had found no sign that terrorists were responsible.
"We are sure there is no possibility of terrorism because it is very obvious there is no outside intervention of any kind," said Shaker Qelada, the Egyptian leading the investigation into the January 3 crash.
"What we are looking at is a classic aircraft accident. It could be a technical defect or mismanagement of the crew or a combination of both," he said.
Gerard Legauffre, a French investigator, said "we made a first quick reading of the black boxes and the cockpit voice recorder shows there is no outside intervention."
Egyptian and French investigators had previously said terrorism was all but ruled out after an Egyptian charter plane bound for Paris crashed minutes after take-off from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 148 people aboard, almost all of them French tourists.
The black box flight recorders were retrieved by a French submarine robot at the weekend from depths of more than 1 000m beneath the sea.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1472019,00.htmlWell, this report said black boxe"S". I didn't know they had found both. And what does "mismanagement of the crew mean? That covers a lot of bases. Also, if they have both boxes they should know if there was or was not a "technical" problem with the plane. Unless someone else can intervene in this investigation we will probably never know what happened to this plane.