[HardStarboard]

There was a great deal of effort to deny that the Egypt Air flight that went down off Rhode Island (Conneticut?) a few years back was a result of Islamist terrorism or craziness.

That flight was filled with Egyptian military officers that had been to a training school in the US. Wasn't that determined to be the reason the flight was brought down by the copilot?

[leadpenny]

I thought the Egyptian pilot was about to be fired by his company and was "losing face."

[Gunrunner2]

"There was a great deal of effort to deny that the Egypt Air flight that went down off Rhode Island (Connecticut?) a few years back was a result of Islamist terrorism or craziness."

Do recall some "craziness" popping up here and there to float another conspiracy thing.

"That flight was filled with Egyptian military officers that had been to a training school in the US."

The Egyptian military has scores of officers in the US at any given time. These officers are training in any number of things, from English language, computer skills, how to operate and maintain a front loader to how to fly F-16's or operate an M1 tank. Egypt is not rich like other Arab nations, and therefore, they do not fly regular flights on non-Egyptian airlines. They fly on Egypt Air, the national airline of Egypt. Therefore, on these flights, that leave about once a week, most all (if not all at some times) the seats are filled with Egyptian military officers. Nothing strange there. Further, the Egyptian military is based upon the old Soviet model where you have no skilled enlisted, very few NCO's and officers do the manual labor a US enlisted would perform. Consequently, the presence of Egyptian officers is not unusual nor strange nor a lucrative target---there simply were no "high ranking" (meaning powerful) officers on-board.

"Wasn't that determined to be the reason the flight was brought down by the copilot?"

Co-Pilot was experiencing some, shall we say, "personal problems." He was a piss-poor pilot, been disciplined for it, recently was in trouble for acting as a cad in NYC, and a few other things I'll not talk about here. That said, he did go nuts and killed all and himself.

The only people that had any stake in trying to deny terrorism were the Egyptians themselves, as they simply cannot accept responsibility for a nutty pilot. It isn't in their nature. (This should not be news, as the Islamic mind never accepts responsibility, it must always be someone else’s fault or the Vast Jewish Conspiracy in action.)

Egypt Air is also rated, at the time, 113 out of about 120 of the world's airlines when it comes to flight safety. The "powers" in Egypt understood it was becoming too hard for them to keep blaming others and they engaged the National Civil Aviation Authority (NCATO) to build a FAA-style flight standards agency to bring them up to speed and reduce mishaps and weed out the nutty pilots.

Unfortunately, 9-11 happened and the scarce funds for the new initiative were diverted to other security actions and that project was placed on hold.