(File photo of EgyptAir Flight 990 on a better day. Photo Wikipedia).
I am so over this winter, and it won’t get its claws out of us. I was awake at one thirty, still wrestling with the time change. I have given up on the tossing-and-turning thing, and just pad to the kitchen, looking for evidence of mouse infestation, pour a snort of Bailey’s and read for a while on the iPad. There was a special election to replace C. W. “Bill” Young, one of my favorite southern politicians when I was working on the Hill, and the unfortunate news that we are going to get hit with the edge of another front that will bring storms, possible tornadoes and a temperature drop of almost 50 degrees this afternoon.
I should have gone back to Key West when I could have. No update on the missing jet, which according to my on-site sources is “a pain in the butt.”
The Exterminator is supposed to show up at some point this morning- Rhonda at the Big Pink Concierge Desk told me that the current wave of terror apparently was first reported by the unit across the hall, and it was not surprising that the tiny rodents had snuck under my front door and taken up digs under the dishwasher. “Humane traps,” she said primly. “It happens periodically, mostly on the first floor.”
“I expect that would probably be the case,” I said. “At least until the little things master the art of flight.”
I decided to get out of the apartment for a while to let the mouse/mice have some time to themselves before the outbreak of hostilities. The jet thing was bugging me, since I had arrived at a variety of theories by the end of the day. When I saw Old Jim at Willow, he told me the wreckage had been found, and I was briefly buoyed by the idea that we would soon have some answers,
Unfortunately, that was older information than mine, and at the end of the day- which for me was around eight-thirty PM, we were back to square one about what happened. In the first flurry of correspondence of the morning, a senior analyst whose views I respect summed it up nicely: “We don’t know squat.”
They are tearing apart the information on the crew this morning, on the chance that the Pilot and First Officer might be complicit in what happened, whatever it was. The case of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999 was advanced in support of that possibility, and I remembered the event pretty well- it happened about twenty minutes into the outbound flight from JFK and about seventy miles south of Nantucket Island.
Onboard the Boeing 767-300 were a hundred American tourists and a couple dozen mid-to-senior grade Egyptian military officers, twenty-odd Canadians and a sprinkling of other African citizens. The flight originated at LAX with only three dozen passengers , with the majority boarding in New York. Airline rules required two complete flight deck crews be onboard to split the duty for crew-rest considerations. The relief captain was a fellow named Gameel al-Batouti, a 59-year-old veteran pilot with more than 12,000 flight hours and over 5,000 hours in type.
Things started off routinely, and Flight 990 checked through three controllers as it climbed to cruising altitude. Then something as inexplicable as what happened to the Malaysian jet occurred. New York Air Route Traffic Center lost radar contact abruptly, could not raise the aircraft on radio, and then requested nearby Lufthansa and Air France flights try to raise EgyptAir on the radio and look for anything out of the ordinary.
That is where the matter had to stay for a while. There were jurisdictional issues, of course: like the missing Malaysian jet, the incident occurred over (and in) international waters, and according to ICAO rules, the tiny Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority had jurisdiction for the investigation.
That obviously was absurd, as the situation in the South China Sea will be if the missing airplane is located. Anyway, the Egyptians asked the American National Transportation Safety Board to handle it in their name. Navy and Coast guard units arrived on scene and did commendable work on the recovery, locating the cockpit data recorders within a couple days.
(The crucial last minute of the flight of EgyptAir 990. Chart courtesy NTSB).
That is where things began to get strange. I am sure you recall what the recorders revealed. Al-Batouti replaced the Captain in Command who made a trip to the lavatory at about the twenty minute mark of the flight. The recording said he muttered the phrase “Tawkalt ala Allah”, which translates from the classical Egyptian Arabic dialect to “I rely on God.”
A minute later, the autopilot was disengaged, immediately followed by the First Officer again saying, “I rely on God.” Three seconds later, the throttles for both engines were reduced to idle, and both elevators were moved three degrees nose down. That would result on a zero-G regime, which would definitely get the attention of everyone on board. Batouti repeated “I rely on God” seven more times before the Captain in Command returned and asked repeatedly, “What’s happening, what’s happening?”
Apparently there was a struggle for the controls, since the flight data recorder reflected the elevators then moved into a split condition, with the left elevator up and the right elevator down, probably resulting from the left seat pushing forward and the right seat pulling the stick back.
At the end of the brief drama, both engines were shut down as Batouti movied the start levers from “run” to “cutoff.” The Captain in Command is is heard to say: “What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engines?” The rest, as the Bard said, is silence.
That was the version of the NTSB report, which was not taken well by the Egyptians. Some speculate that it was President Mubarak himself who declared that nothing of the sort could have happened, and his safety people issued their own report that the elevators failed and it was all Boeing’s fault, and probably an American conspiracy and maybe someone shot down the aircraft.
It was as expected as it was bizarre. I recall running into the Egyptian version of reality one time on a tour bus, heading from al Iskandria to Cairo, when our guide cheerfully explained that they had won the Arab-Israeli War.
Oh well. I suppose it is possible that something like what happened to EgyptAir 990, but just about everything is possible at the moment, and I have heard stranger theories over the last couple days.
I imagine we will just have to cool our jets and wait to find out.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303