[Clubhouse]

EgyptAir pilot reportedly spoke with air traffic control minutes before crash....

The pilot of EgyptAir Flight 804 spoke to air traffic control for “several minutes” before the doomed aircraft took its fatal plunge, according to a report that directly contradicts initial accounts of the crash.

Pilot Mohamed Said Shoukair had “a conversation” with air traffic controllers in Cairo, according to The Independent, citing French television station M6.

The plane was headed from Paris to Cairo Thursday when it went down somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, killing all 66 aboard. Flight data automatically sent by sensors on aircraft indicated smoke inside the plane, officials said.

After the conversation, the pilot made an “emergency descent” in an effort to depressurize the cabin and clear the smoke, according to the French station.

But the report is the first that has Shoukair speaking to Egyptian authorities on the ground about the emergency.

After the flight vanished, an EgyptAir spokesman said there was a distress call from the airbus, but the statement was later refuted by the Egyptian military and withdrawn by the airline.

nypost.com

[Clubhouse]

I'm starting to think this was an electrical fire caused by faulty avionics equipment.

[Meridian]

Must have been terrifying on board with smoke and the plane plummeting like that. Those children..

I'm a nervous flyer when my kids are with me as it feeds my worst fears. No one ever survives these things. They do all that safety talk at the beginning but ultimately you're done.

[Sharon]

This is the heartbreaking picture of the youngest victim of the doomed EgyptAir Flight 804 passenger plane which crashed in the Mediterranean on Thursday morning.



Four-month-old baby Joumana Bettiche died alongside her two-year-old brother Mohamed and their parents as they jetted off on a family holiday together



They were among 66 victims who died in the disaster just 20 minutes from landing in Cairo after taking off from Paris.

The two children had been on their way to the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for their first family holiday with dad Faycal Bettiche and mum Nouha.



Mr Bettiche, a French Algerian vegetable seller in Angers, France, had apparently wanted to treat his children to a holiday before work became too hectic over the summer.

The pilot

[Clubhouse]

EgyptAir MS804: Now investigators DENY an explosion brought down doomed passenger jet.....



RECOVERED body parts from doomed Egyptair flight MS804 do not suggest the plane was brought down by a bomb, a top investigator has claimed.

The reason the Airbus A320 carrying 66 people – including Briton Richard Osman – crashed into the Mediterranean last Thursday remains a mystery almost a week later.

And a forensics expert at a Cairo morgue yesterday claimed some of the 80 body parts recovered from the Mediterranean were so small an explosion must have taken place before the jet plummeted.

But head of Egypt's forensics authority Hisham Abdelhamid said the assessment was "mere assumptions" and that it was too early to draw conclusions.

The intervention comes as Egyptian investigators revealed the plane showed no technical problems before taking off from Paris.

Sources within the investigation committee also denied the plane swerved before it disappeared from radar screens.

Air traffic controllers from Greece and Egypt have given different accounts of the plane's final moments.

An aircraft technical log signed by its pilot before takeoff revealed no problems before take-off while the plane transmitted 11 "electronic messages" before disappearing from radar screens.

The first two messages indicated the engines were functional and the third message showed a rise in the temperature of the co-pilot's window.

The plane kept transmitting messages for the next three minutes before vanishing, the log showed.

Two sources with direct knowledge of the investigation said it would be premature to say what caused the plane to plunge into the sea.

One insider said: “All we know is it disappeared suddenly without making a distress call,” adding that only by analysing the black boxes or a large amount of debris could authorities begin to form a clearer picture.

Investigators have only a few scraps of data in the form of fault messages sent by the jet in the last minutes of flight – logging smoke alarms in the forward lavatory and an electronics bay just underneath.

"The difficulty is to connect these bits of information," said John Cox, executive of Washington-based Safety Operating Systems who co-authored a report on smoke and fire risks by Britain's Royal Aeronautical Society.

There are too few messages to fit a typical fire – which would normally trigger a cascade of error reports as multiple systems failed – and too many of them to tie in neatly with a single significant explosion, he said.

Investigators also need to understand why there was no message indicating the autopilot had cut off – progressively handing control back to the pilots as systems failed and computers became unsure what to do.

Egypt has deployed a robot submarine and France has sent a search ship to help hunt for the planes black boxes – but it is not clear whether either can detect signals emitted by the flight recorders, lying in waters possibly 10,000ft deep.


http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/...rd-Osman-Cairo

[a175]

After experiencing several in-flight aircraft equipment failures that I can remember (3 military, 1 civilian) that whole "everything's all good, just sign here" doesn't carry much weight with me. 2 were Air Force fixed wing, 1 was Army rotor wing, and the last a major US airline... all allegedly passed a pre-flight.

Smoke in the lavatory and electronics bay below brings to mind a host of previous aircraft fires due to faulty wiring.

[lesslis2015]

Yea, publicly, who knows at this point but the fact that they were so high and no distress call from flight crew is ”strange"? Still thinking huge internal explosion that hopefully knocked everyone out including pilots. Time will tell.