Out of Thin Air

Even for sisters, Rania and Soha Rida shared a lot. They were happily planning a joint wedding since each was engaged to an EgyptAir steward. But hours before the EgyptAir Flight 990's fatal crash on Oct. 31, neither of their prospective mates was in a cheery mood. Rania says that in a telephone chat, Hassan Farouk expressed misgivings about the trip, muttering about "technical problems." Soha told an Egyptian weekly that Mohammed Galal was dreading a "very bad flight."

His premonition came disastrously true. Half an hour after lifting off from New York City en route to Cairo, the Boeing 767-300 ER dropped from 33,000 to 16,700 ft. in less than 40 sec., hurtling downward at nearly the speed of sound. For a moment, the plane seemed to catch itself and climbed upward for more than a mile before peeling into a final fatal dive. At 10,000 ft., radar records suggest that the plane broke apart, sprinkling shards of the 767 and its human cargo into the waters off the Massachusetts coast. The wild ride lasted less than two minutes and left behind a slew of puzzling questions. Was the crew alive during those final moments? Did the pilots manage to briefly pull the plane out of its dive, or was the aircraft reflexively entering a climb as the near-supersonic dive increased the lift of its wings? And why were the pilots unable to send out a distress signal?

At the Cairo airport, EgyptAir officials in dark blue suits could do little more than confirm the names of the 217 passengers and crew, among them 62 Egyptians and 106 Americans. "I want to stay at the airport forever," said Hanafi Abdel Fattah, upon learning he had lost his eldest daughter, Walaa. "I cannot go home and face my wife." Other family members immediately accepted EgyptAir's offer to fly them to the U.S. to be close to the recovery efforts. Explained one bewildered relative: "All the information is in America, they say."

Navy vessels equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and seasoned divers struggled to answer what were, initially, unanswerable questions. The Deep Drone, an underwater robot outfitted with sonar and cameras, located the crucial black boxes--the flight-data recorder and cockpit-voice recorders--within days. The flight-data recorder from the 767-300 is a new design that stores 55 measurements of the plane's movements and control inputs--as much as five times more than previous models--that should help investigators piece together what went wrong.

If history is their guide, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) staff will take a hard look at a problematic piece of equipment on the Boeing 767--the thrust reverser. These devices slow the aircraft down during landing by reversing the airflow from the engines. And while the devices are great for shortening landing rolls--or stopping a plane during an aborted takeoff--they can be deadly if accidentally deployed in flight. In 1991 a thrust reverser on a Lauda Air Boeing 767 deployed in midair, sending the plane into a death plunge over Thailand. That jet was No. 283 on Boeing's assembly line. EgyptAir Flight 990 was jet No. 282. In the two months before the crash, the FAA took steps to require airlines to make two fixes in the thrust reversers used on 767 engines, including one to prevent the accidental deployment of a disabled reverser. One of Flight 990's thrust reversers had been deactivated just before the fatal flight.