Blast From the Past: At Odds on Crash Theory, Officials Are Cooperative

In his first public comments on the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, the director of the F.B.I., Louis J. Freeh, said today that the Egyptian authorities were cooperating with the inquiry into the cause of the crash and would investigate a list of leads at the request of American law-enforcement officials.

Mr. Freeh, speaking with reporters at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the authorities in Cairo were assisting American investigators even though Egyptian officials have dismissed the principal American theory that a reserve pilot might have deliberately brought down the airliner.

In a separate development, aviation safety experts and Egyptian investigators have completed a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder in Arabic but have not completed an English translation, an official at the National Transportation Safety Board said today.

American investigators have not ruled out any possibility for the Oct. 31 crash but have primarily centered their examination on Gamil al-Batouti, an EgyptAir reserve pilot. They theorize that it was Mr. Batouti who pitched the Boeing 767 into a steep dive toward the Atlantic Ocean. The aircraft crashed in the sea about 60 miles south of Nantucket Island, killing all 217 people aboard.

At 1:48 Batouti found the junior co-pilot’s pen and handed it across to Habashi. He said, “Look, here’s the new first officer’s pen. Give it to him, please. God spare you.” He added, “To make sure it doesn’t get lost.”

Habashi said, “Excuse me, Jimmy, while I take a quick trip to the toilet.” He ran his electric seat back with a whir. There was the sound of the cockpit door moving.

Batouti said, “Go ahead, please.”

Habashi said, “Before it gets crowded. While they are eating. And I’ll be back to you.”

Again the cockpit door moved. There was a clunk. There was a clink. It seems that Batouti was now alone in the cockpit. The 767 was at 33,000 feet, cruising peacefully eastward at .79 Mach.

At 1:48:30 a strange, wordlike sound was uttered, three syllables with emphasis on the second, perhaps more English than Arabic, and variously heard on the tape as “control it,” “hydraulic,” or something unintelligible. The NTSB ran extensive speech and sound-spectrum studies on it, and was never able to assign it conclusively to Batouti or to anyone else. But what is clear is that Batouti then softly said, “Tawakkalt ala Allah,” which proved difficult to translate, and was at first rendered incorrectly, but essentially means “I rely on God.” An electric seat whirred. The autopilot disengaged, and the airplane sailed on as before for another four seconds. Again Batouti said, “I rely on God.” Then two things happened almost simultaneously, according to the flight-data recorder: the throttles in the cockpit moved back fast to minimum idle, and a second later, back at the tail, the airplane’s massive elevators (the pitch-control surfaces) dropped to a three-degrees-down position. When the elevators drop, the tail goes up; and when the tail goes up, the nose points down. Apparently Batouti had chopped the power and pushed the control yoke forward.

The effect was dramatic. The airplane began to dive steeply, dropping its nose so quickly that the environment inside plunged to nearly zero gs, the weightless condition of space. Six times in quick succession Batouti repeated, “I rely on God.” His tone was calm. There was a loud thump. As the nose continued to pitch downward, the airplane went into the negative-g range, nudging loose objects against the ceiling. The elevators moved even farther down. Batouti said, “I rely on God.”

Somehow, in the midst of this, now sixteen seconds into the dive, Captain Habashi made his way back from the toilet. He yelled, “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

Batouti said, “I rely on God.”

The wind outside was roaring. The airplane was dropping through 30,800 feet, and accelerating beyond its maximum operating speed of .86 Mach. In the cockpit the altimeters were spinning like cartoon clocks. Warning horns were sounding, warning lights were flashing—low oil pressure on the left engine, and then on the right. The master alarm went off, a loud high-to-low warble.

For the last time Batouti said, “I rely on God.”

Again Habashi shouted, “What’s happening?” By then he must have reached the left control yoke. The negative gs ended as he countered the pitch-over, slowing the rate at which the nose was dropping. But the 767 was still angled down steeply, 40 degrees below the horizon, and it was accelerating. The rate of descent hit 39,000 feet a minute.

“What’s happening, Gameel? What’s happening?”

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2001/11/langewiesche.htm

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