Posted on 01/03/2004 11:36:24 AM PST by kattracks
Sunday January 4, 12:54 AMEgyptian and French officials rushed to exclude terrorism as a possible cause for the crash of a charter plane after it took off for Paris from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
"The incident is absolutely not the result of a terrorist act, but is linked to a technical failure of the plane," Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said of the disaster that officials said killed all 148 people aboard.
In Paris, French Transport Minister Gilles de Robien said there was nothing to indicate that the cause of the crash was anything but an accident.
"We are largely working on the theory that this was an accident," de Robien told reporters. "Nothing indicates that there could have been any other cause."
The Egyptian navy and others were searching for the plane's black box flight data recorders in a search operation joined by Italian navy ships stationed in the Red Sea.
Maher said he had agreed during a phone conversation with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin that the two countries would cooperate to determine the causes of the incident.
France's junior transport minister Dominique Bussereau said the plane had a problem at takeoff.
"The plane had a problem at take-off and then tried to turn around, and it was at that moment that it apparently crashed," Bussereau told reporters before leaving for Egypt.
Egypt's tourism industry, the main source of foreign currency for the country, suffered a heavy blow in November 1997 when Islamic militants opened fire at a tourist site in Luxor, killing 56 foreigners.
A tourism industry official told AFP he was worried foreigners might cancel travel plans to Egypt during the peak season, even if the crash turns out to be an accident.
A senior police officer in Sharm el-Sheikh told AFP on condition he not be named that some witnesses had reported hearing an explosion in the pre-dawn hours but he said it was the result of the plane hitting the water.
"There was no explosion aboard the plane before it crashed into the sea," said civil aviation ministry engineer Faisal al-Shennawi.
Civil Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafik, who went to Sharm el-Sheikh with senior aides and technical experts, also said the crash was an accident.
"The aircraft had an ordinary technical failure just after take-off, which caused a loss of control and it crashed into the sea south of the airport of Sharm Sheikh," Shafik told state-run television, without specifying the nature of the failure.
"I hope we can soon determine the causes of the incident in a definitive way, although I repeat that it was the result of a technical failure," Shafik added.
Shafik said the plane's "altitude was not high, which made it very difficult for the pilot to save the aircraft and take it back" safely to the airport, adding that it had passed all required tests.
Egyptian officials said the plane disappeared from the radar screens around 4:44 am (0244 GMT).
"The control towers of Cairo and Sharm el-Sheikh airports received no distress call from the pilot before the crash," a Cairo airport official said.
Debris was found around seven kilometers (three miles) south of the airport at Sharm el-Sheikh, he added.
The Boeing 737-300 jet was one of two operated by Flash Airlines, both manufactured in 1993, according to the company's website. The airline was founded six years ago by Egyptian and Italian businessmen, a company official said.
They seem in a bit of a hurry!
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Exactly. This is getting to be standard procedure now. And, in the event there are hundreds of witnesses such as with Flight 800, they just discount them as delusional. If we ever find out the truth, that plane was terrorized as surely as Hillary got some slippery "help" with those cattle futures, Redbone.
They seem in a bit of a hurry!
Not surprising. The Egyptians want to avoid another tourism scare, of course. I don't know why dying from terrorism is more frightening than dying from an accident, but it is.
The French have an agenda, too, since the plane that crashed was built by their competitor (Boeing). If the cause is ruled to be terrorism, Airbus and Boeing both lose orders, but if it's a defect in a Boeing plane, Airbus can gain from it.
Unless there's some independent oversight, this investigation may need to be investigated...
Just your usual, everyday, no-fault technical failure that causes airborne vehicles to suddenly drop from the sky. Coulda happened to anybody from Chuck Yeager to Chuckie Cheese.
"Because we would never hit one of our own planes, hahahaha."
I am not an airline expert but seem to believe that it takes days, months, forever to identify cause of catastrophe.
How can terrorism be ruled out so quickly? Were the black boxes located?
Even with a mechanical failure, could sabotage be ruled out so quickly? Have the mechanics, airline crews been investigated, interviewed, cleared???
From the linked DEBKA story. I didn't see that the charter company was Egyptian anywhere else. Likely to have an EGYPTIAN pilot? They have a bad track record.
Oh, probably just a loose stabilizer or wing or something. The average everyday kind of stuff.
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