EgyptAir jet sent smoke alarms
Smoke was detected inside an EgyptAir plane shortly before it plunged into the Mediterranean with 66 people on board, investigators said yesterday, offering clues but no answers about why it crashed.
The Airbus A320 had been flying from Paris to Cairo early Thursday when it plummeted and turned full circle before vanishing from radar screens, without its crew sending a distress signal.
A spokesman for France's BEA air accident investigation agency said the signals did not indicate what caused the smoke or fire on board the plane.
One aviation source said that a fire on board would likely have generated multiple warning signals, while a sudden explosion may not have generated any - though officials stress that no scenario, including explosion, is being ruled out.
While Egypt's aviation minister has pointed to terrorism as more likely than technical failure, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault yesterday said that nothing was being ruled out.
"At this time... all theories are being examined and none is favoured," he told a news conference in Paris after meeting relatives of passengers.
Egypt said its navy had found human remains, wreckage and the personal belongings of passengers floating in the Mediterranean about 290 km (180 miles) north of Alexandria.
Analysis of the debris and recovery of the plane's twin flight recorders are likely to be key to determining the cause of the crash - the third blow since October to Egypt's travel industry, still reeling from political unrest following the 2011 uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak.
A suspected Islamic State bombing brought down a Russian airliner after it took off from Sharm el-Sheikh airport in late October, killing all 224 people on board, and an EgyptAir plane was hijacked in March by a man wearing a fake suicide belt.
The October crash devastated Egyptian tourism. Egypt's tourism revenue in the first three months of the year plunged by two thirds to $500 million from a year earlier.
Officials added that the priority now was to find the two flight recorders, known as black boxes, containing cockpit voice recordings and data readings, from the Airbus A320.
The plane came down in one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean, a source in the Egyptian-led investigation said. Another person familiar with Western naval estimates said the wreckage could be in waters 2,000 to 3,000 metres deep. That would place the black box locator beacons, which last for 30 days, on the edge of their detectable range from the surface.
Egyptair said in a statement that officials met family members and told them the process of gathering body parts and information would take time. DNA testing to identify victims would require weeks, the airline said.
The flight data transmitted before the crash was sent through an automatic system called the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which routinely downloads maintenance and fault data to the airline operator.
Aviation Herald, a respected Austria-based website specialising in air accidents, first published a burst of seven messages broadcast over the space of three minutes. These included alarms about smoke in the lavatory as well as the aircraft's avionics area, which sits under the cockpit.
While suggesting a possible fire, the relatively short sequence of data gives no insight into pilot efforts to control the aircraft, nor does it show whether it fell in one piece or disintegrated in mid-air, two aviation safety experts said.
The data fragments also included alarms related to cockpit window heating and two flight control computers, both of which have backups.
"The question now is whether the fire that caused the smoke was the result of an electrical fault - for example a short-circuit caused by damaged wiring - or whether some form of explosive or incendiary device was used - for example by a terrorist - to generate a fire or other damage," aviation safety expert David Learmont said.
The ACARS data suggested the fire had spread quickly and "that might explain the fact that there was no distress call", Learmont wrote in a blog.
The aircraft was carrying 56 passengers, including a child and two infants, and 10 crew. They included 30 Egyptian and 15 French nationals, along with citizens of 10 other countries.
France sent an airplane and navy ship to help search for the jet. The naval search is centred on an area north of Alexandria.
A European satellite spotted a 2 km-long oil slick in the Mediterranean, about 40 km (20 nautical miles) southeast of the aircraft's last known position, the European Space Agency said.
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