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Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Flight 804 pilot didn’t initiate emergency descent; French navy ship arrives to search for black boxes; public prosecutor asks France, Greece for records

Egypt denied yesterday that the pilot of EgyptAir Flight 804 took emergency steps to try to clear the aircraft of smoke before the airliner disappeared from radar. Reports in the Western press earlier in the day suggested the pilot had “spoken with air traffic control … for several minutes before the plane crashed [and] told Cairo control about the smoke which had engulfed parts of the aircraft and decided to make an emergency descent to try to clear the fumes.”

National Air Navigation Services Company Chairman Mohy El Din Azmi denied those reports in interviews yesterday. He also said the flight “had been flying at its normal height of 37,000ft (11,280m) before dropping off the radar. ‘That fact degrades what the Greeks are saying about the aircraft suddenly losing altitude before it vanished from radar. … There was no turning to right or left, and it was fine when it entered Egypt’s FIR, which took nearly a minute or two before it disappeared,’” Azmi added. A number of Greek claims about the disaster have been proven to have been incorrect, from the initial location of the disaster to the first reports of bodies and the wreckage.

Egypt’s Public Prosecutor asked his French counterpart to hand over documents, audio, and video records related to the plane during its stay at Charles de Gaulle and until it left French airspace, his office said in a statement on Monday, according to Reuters. He also requested that Greek authorities hand over call transcripts between the pilot and the country’s air traffic control officials, adding that officials should be questioned over whether the pilot sent a distress signal.

A French ship arrived in the search area to help look for wreckage from EgyptAir Flight 804, the Associated Press reported yesterday. If found intact, the contents of the black box will be analysed in Egypt but will be sent abroad should it be found in a damaged state, accident investigator Hani Galal said in televised comments on Monday, Reuters reports. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal (paywall) claims accident investigators unaffiliated with the ongoing search are concerned about how crash debris is being handled, saying it could jeopardise the investigation.

The teams searching for the black box face “technical constraints that aviation experts increasingly blame on a slow regulatory response to earlier disasters,” Tim Hepher and Ahmed Aboulenein write for Reuters. Rescuers have barely 30 days until the batteries on underwater beacons guiding searchers to black boxes die, and despite regulators agreeing to increase their transmission time and range, the changes do not come into effect until 2018: “too late to help find EgyptAir 804.”

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