France Plays Down Claim Attack Caused Plane Crash

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - France said on Monday it attached little credence to a previously unknown Islamic group's claim to have brought down a plane that crashed off Egypt, killing 133 French tourists and 15 other people.

Egypt again defended the safety record of Flash Airlines, operators of the Boeing 737 that plunged into the Red Sea on Saturday, but Switzerland issued a fresh statement that it had banned the Egyptian company from its airspace on safety grounds.

French civil aviation authority head Michel Wachenheim said France's own checks on the doomed plane had showed "nothing abnormal."

An anonymous caller claiming to represent a Yemen-based group called Ansar al-Haq (Followers of the Truth) told an international news agency the group had downed the plane and would also attack Air France planes unless the French government dropped plans to ban Islamic headscarves from state schools.

Although France says no conclusions can be made on why the plane crashed until all the facts are known, French Justice Minister Dominique Perben said: "On the basis of the information in my possession, (the claim) is not very credible."

The Egyptian government has ruled out an attack on the charter plane, which crashed shortly after take-off from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh bound for Cairo and Paris.

French officials said the plane's two flight recorders, which could hold the key to explaining why it crashed, had not been located yet. The so-called "black boxes" record technical data about the flight and conversations between the pilots.

French experts had to delay plans to use a submersible robot to search for the flight recorders from the wreckage of the plane, now lying in deep water off Sharm el-Sheikh.

"The robot arrived yesterday...but it takes time to prepare the specialist equipment and coordinate and organize with the teams," said France's ambassador to Egypt, Jean-Claude Cousseran.

Swiss authorities said on Monday they had found two Flash aircraft unsafe in 2002, raising the possibility that one was the plane that crashed on Saturday.

In Cairo, Flash officials were not immediately available for comment on the Swiss statement.

But they have said the doomed plane was one of only two that Flash has operated in recent years, including all of 2002, although Swiss officials were unable to confirm positively that it was one of those they had inspected.

Switzerland said it had inspected one of Flash's aircraft in April 2002 and found various problems, including missing navigation documents, fuel reserves not calculated to international standards and maintenance deficiencies.

The Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation said an inspection of a second Flash aircraft in October 2002 had revealed "essentially the same defects."

After Flash failed to provide sufficient proof the defects had been remedied, it was barred from landing in Switzerland a few days later, the office said.

Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Ahmed Mohamed Shafiq Zaki said earlier on Monday the Swiss had let a Flash plane take off from Zurich with 148 Swiss tourists in October 2002 after giving the plane a safety check.

(Reporting by Opheera Mcdoom, additional reporting by Amil Khan and Thierry Leveque in Paris)

Geeze. All the conspiratroids are out. Look, when you hear hoofbeats, do you expect zebras, or horses? When a plane operated by a low-budget charter line crashes in a third-world country, we see every kind of conspiracy mentioned.

Some fool says because Tony Blair was in the area, it must be terrorism. Look, Tony gets around, and not too many planes crash. The Islamists don't find Egypt a very congenial place to operate, ever since they whacked President Sadat they have been hunted down like dogs. We're going to need a little more proof than the proximity of Tony to call this terrorism.

Some fool says that because the plane is in pieces it must have been a bomb. At a typical takeoff weight of around 110,000 lbs and a typical speed of 220 knots, the craft is moving at about 370 feet per second and has a kinetic energy of some 7.6 billion foot-pounds (someone check my math; I did it it my head). On impact with water, all that energy has to go somewhere ("in a collision all energy is conserved.") Some of it will go to displace large quantities of water; other parts will be redirected back upon the hull of the aircraft, shattering it and most probably killing (& dismembering) its occupants instantly. The friction of the denser medium of water will decelerate the aircraft parts very quickly and they will either be found directly below the point of impact, or down-current (where exactly can be calculated if the current is accurately plotted).

By the way, that's middle school to junior high physics. If it looks like Greek to you, your parents got ripped off by your school district.

Planes that crash in water at any speed are usually fragmented -- from John Denver's Long-EZ and JFK Jr's Saratoga to giant jetliners and military planes.

And many fools (including those Islamist terrorist-wannabees cited in the article at the head of this thread) use this as a stick to beat the French with. I'd like to remind people that while France and the USA parted company on Iraq, largely because large French companies and nationalised enterprises were some of Saddam's biggest armourers and sanctions-busters, French soldiers have been in Afghanistan with ours since 2002. France and the USA have shared intelligence on terrorism and worked together on terrorism since the 1970s. Just because they're not our best friends, doesn't mean they're our enemies. Let's have a little respect for the loss of life here, people -- the crew and passengers of that plane were real people like you and I who deserved to live but were fated to die. Let's find out why, so that their death can be of some use to us, in preventing it from happening again (whatever "it" was).

Here is an aviation press news article with some more information about Flash Airlines. Egypt Crash: Was 737 Airworthy [aero-news.net] (Note: the story says "security" but in many European languages the word for "security" and "safety" is the same. This is a "safety" issue). Apparently the reason that Flash is banned in Switzerland is not only that one of their planes had maintenance irregularities there, but also false maintenance documents. Specifically, it is looking like mandatory maintenance and upgrades (Airworthiness Directives) had been performed only on paper and the actual repairs had not been done on a Flash airplane. Important: we don't know yet if this was the same airplane. Still, even if it wasn't, if this report is true it says terrible things about maintenance at Flash.

Thorough examination of the wreckage, and of the plane's maintenance history, will tell if this is the case (and let us know whether French and Swiss aviation officials need to talk more often/more openly). At this point, if the Flash people have done anything improper in the maintenance of the airplane, it will definitely come out, and they will be facing very severe penalties (whether or not this had anything to do with the crash).

At the same time, thorough examination of the wreckage and the DFDR will tell us exactly why the plane crashed. If it is terrorism, that will be very clear. There is no way that you can put a bomb in a plane (which terrorists and criminals have done since the 1940s at least) or shoot a plane down with a missile (as terrorists have done since the 1970s) and not leave a mark.

But anybody who "knows" why this plane went in, at this time, is operating on hunch, guess, fantasy (there's a lot of that in aviation threads on this board), or superstition. The facts at this point do not support any explanation. It's like a jigsaw puzzle where we haven't even found the corner pieces yet. In time, the facts will come out. We'll look at the flight recorders, at the wreckage, at the passenger manifest, at the crew records, at the airplane's history all the way back to the pours of alloy used in its parts, if necessary. But at that point, many of the guessers and fantasists will have held so firmly to their preconcieved notions for so long, that they will refuse to believe the findings. Usually, as with TWA800 tinhats, this is accompanied by an unwillingness to even read the evidence that disproves the fantasy.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

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