Saturday November 13 6:24 PM ET

Pilots Mystified By EgyptAir Crash

By TAREK EL-TABLAWY Associated Press Writer

NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) - Experienced pilots are mystified by flight recorder data they say shows that EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately put into a dive, saying whatever was done in the cockpit was not a standard emergency measure.

One veteran former 767 pilot said the actions indicated by the tape were consistent with what someone in the cockpit would do if they deliberately wanted to crash the plane.

Another, Barry Schiff, a former TWA 767 pilot from Los Angeles and currently an aviation accident investigator, said the data shows that some human factor was responsible rather than some system failure.

``I racked my brain and I can't think of any emergency that would lead to these maneuvers,'' said Schiff.

National Transportation Safety Board officials continue to focus on all possible causes for the crash that killed 217, including mechanical problems. Officials say they are not leaning toward any specfic theory. They said Saturday that investigators would travel to Seattle this week to use a Boeing 767 flight simulator.

NTSB investigator Greg Phillips said information from Flight 990's flight data recorder would be entered into the simulator to study how the airplane would react.

Preliminary data released Friday by the NTSB showed that the plane was put into a dive so steep and fast that passengers would briefly have been rendered weightless. And both engines were shut off before the aircraft climbed briefly out of its dive and then turned and plunged into the ocean.

NTSB chairman James Hall said the data raised many questions and offered no conclusions on what caused the plane to crash two weeks ago on a flight from New York to Cairo.

Investigators hope the plane's cockpit voice recorder will answer the questions raised by the data recorder's information.

``It's vital that we get the cockpit voice recorder,'' Phillips said Saturday. ``We certainly need every piece of information we can get.''

Two underwater robots were back at work scouring the ocean floor all day Saturday searching for the voice recorder amid the plane's wreckage. Navy technicians manipulating the robots have heard the pinging signal of the voice recorder's locator beacon, but they had been unable to see the orange box amid the silt and piles of debris.

Navy Rear Adm. William Sutton said the ``umbilical cord'' on one of the robots was damaged Saturday, but it was repaired and the vessel returned to the search.

Hall said Saturday that calm seas had given searchers a ``48-hour window of opportunity,'' but he said those conditions would end soon. Bad weather has forced investigators to temporarily suspend the search in the past.

``That window is likely to close (Sunday) evening,'' he said.

One veteran pilot said the actions taken on the Boeing 767, such as shutting off the engines, seemed to be the exact opposite of what would be done by someone who was trying to save the airplane.

``Someone on that airplane was trying to make that airplane crash and they succeeded,'' said the aviator, a former United Airlines pilot with 7,000 hours piloting 767s, who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

The pilots suggested that the wild roller coaster maneuvers could be evidence of a struggle for the controls, perhaps during a skyjacking or a suicide attempt.

``Those are contrary moves with contrary motives indicative of a struggle in the cockpit,'' said Schiff.

But they noted that while anyone could put the plane into a dive, only someone who had knowledge of the cockpit layout on a commercial airliner would be able to figure out how to shut down the engines.

The flight data also showed the plane's elevators - the flaps on the plane's tail that bend down or up to raise or lift the plane's nose - were uneven during the descent, indicating a major problem.

The elevators are designed to operate in unison. Investigators are trying to determine if the elevator split was caused by the plane's breakup, a jamming problem in one of the elevators, crew panic, or even a struggle for control by two people in the cockpit.

In 1997 in Southeast Asia, a SilkAir Boeing 737 crashed on route to Jakarta from Singapore, killing all 104 people on board. The pilot was described as having experienced personal problems and apparently manually set the plane to crash

Barry Trotter, a former senior investigator with the NTSB and commercial airline pilot, said that while a pilot might turn off an engine if there was a fire, it would be highly improbable for both engines to be on fire at the same time.

And there is no indication in the information released so far that there was any fire on board the aircraft.

``The question is why they initiated the descent from the very beginning,'' said Trotter. A sudden decompression or fire would set off the master warning in the cockpit. However, the alarm apparently was triggered not at the beginning of the dive, when it could have signaled a reason for the sudden descent, but midway through it when the plane reached a velocity close to the speed of sound.

In addition, the cockpit crew never communicated with air traffic controllers to report any problem.

In the case of Flight 990, the pilot and co-pilot both underwent routine physical and psychological checkups within the past five months, the airline's chairman said Saturday.

Pilot Ahmed el-Habashy and co-pilot Adel Anwar were pronounced fit after their exams, said Mohammed Fahim Rayan. El-Habashy was examined 10 days before the Oct. 31 crash and Anwar less than five months before. .

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