Aloft
Page 19
A computer captured what she would have seen – a strangely abstract death no more dramatic than a video game. About two minutes after the final radio call, at 1:49:53 in the morning, the radar swept across EgyptAir’s transponder at 33,000 feet. Afterward, at successive twelve-second intervals, the radar read 31,500, 25,400, and 18,300 feet – a descent rate so great that the air traffic control computers interpreted the information as false, and showed ‘XXXX’ for the altitude on Brennan’s display. With the next sweep the radar lost the transponder entirely, and picked up only an unenhanced ‘primary’ blip, a return from the airplane’s metal mass. The surprise is that the radar continued to receive such returns (which show only location, and not altitude) for nearly another minute and a half, indicating that the dive must have dramatically slowed or stopped, and that the 767 remained airborne, however tenuously, during that interval. A minute and a half is a long time. As the Boeing simulations later showed, it must have been a strange and dreamlike period for the pilots, hurtling through the night with no chance of awakening.
When radar contact was lost, the display for EgyptAir 990 began to ‘coast,’ indicating that the computers could no longer find a correlation between the stored flight plan and the radar view of the sky. When Brennan noticed, she stayed cool. She said, ‘EgyptAir nine-ninety, radar contact lost, recycle transponder, squawk one-seven-one-two.’ EgyptAir did not answer, so she tried again at unhurried intervals over the following ten minutes. She advised Ray Redhead of the problem, and he passed the word along. She called an air-defense radar facility, and other air traffic control centers as far away as Canada, to see if by any chance someone was in contact with the flight. She asked a Lufthansa crew to try transmitting to EgyptAir from up high. Eventually she brought in Air France for the overflight. The prognosis was of course increasingly grim, but she maintained her professional calm. She continued to handle normal operations in her sector while simultaneously setting the search-and-rescue forces in motion. Half an hour into the process, when a controller at Boston Center called and asked, ‘Any luck with the EgyptAir?’ she answered simply, ‘No.’
Among the dead were one hundred Americans, eighty-nine Egyptians (including thirty-three army officers), twenty-two Canadians, and a few people of other nationalities. As the news of the disaster spread, hundreds of frantic friends and relatives gathered at the airports in Los Angeles, New York, and Cairo. EgyptAir officials struggled to meet people’s needs – which were largely, of course, for the sort of information that no one yet had. Most of the bodies remained in and around the wreckage at the bottom of the sea. Decisions now had to be made, and fast, about the recovery operation and the related problem of an investigation. Because the airplane had crashed in international waters, Egypt had the right to lead the show. Realistically, though, it did not have the resources to salvage a heavy airplane in waters 250 feet deep and 5,000 miles away.
The solution was obvious, and it came in the form of a call to the White House from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, an experienced military pilot with close ties to EgyptAir, requesting that the investigation be taken over by the U.S. government. The White House in turn called Jim Hall, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Hall, a Tennessee lawyer and friend of the Gores, had in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 explosion parlayed his position into one of considerable visibility. The Egyptians produced a letter formally signing over the investigation to the United States, an option accorded under international convention, which would place them in a greatly diminished role (as ‘accredited representatives’) but would also save them trouble and money. Mubarak is said to have regretted the move ever since.
In retrospect it seems inevitable that the two sides would have trouble getting along. The NTSB is a puritanical construct, a small federal agency without regulatory power whose sole purpose is to investigate accidents and issue safety recommendations that might add to the public discourse. Established in 1967 as an ‘independent’ unit of the Washington bureaucracy, and shielded by design from the political currents of that city, the agency represents the most progressive American thinking on the role and character of good government. On call twenty-four hours a day, with technical teams ready to travel at a moment’s notice, it operates on an annual baseline budget of merely $62 million or so, and employs only about 420 people, most of whom work at the headquarters on four floors of Washington’s bright and modern Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel. In part because the NTSB seems so lean, and in part because by its very definition it advocates for the ‘right’ causes, it receives almost universally positive press coverage. The NTSB is technocratic. It is clean. It is Government Lite.
EgyptAir, in contrast, is Government Heavy – a state-owned airline with about six hundred pilots and a mixed fleet of about forty Boeings and Airbuses that serves more than eighty destinations worldwide and employs 22,000 people. It operates out of dusty Stalinist-style office buildings at the Cairo airport, under the supervision of the Ministry of Transport, from which it is often practically indistinguishable. It is probably a safe airline, but passengers dislike it for its delays and shoddy service. They call it Air Misère, probably a play on the airline’s former name, Misr Air (‘Misr’ is Arabic for ‘Egypt’). It has been treated as a fiefdom for years by Mubarak’s old and unassailable air-force friends, and particularly by the company’s chairman, a man named Mohamed Fahim Rayan, who fights off all attempts at reform or privatization. This is hardly a secret. In parliamentary testimony six months before the crash of Flight 990, Rayan said, ‘My market is like a water pond which I developed over the years. It is quite unreasonable for alien people to come and seek to catch fish in my pond.’ His critics answer that the pond is stagnant and stinks of corruption – but this, too, is nothing new. The greatest pyramids in Egypt are made not of stone but of people: they are the vast bureaucracies that constitute society’s core, and they function not necessarily to get the ‘job’ done but to reward the personal loyalty of those at the bottom to those at the top. Once you understand that, much of the rest begins to make sense. The bureaucracies serve mostly to shelter their workers and give them something like a decent life. They also help to define Cairo. It is a great capital city, as worldly as Washington, D.C., and culturally very far away.
An official delegation traveled from Cairo to the United States and ended up staying for more than a year. It was led by two EgyptAir pilots, Mohsen al-Missiry, an experienced accident investigator on temporary assignment to the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority for this case, and Shaker Kelada, who had retired from active flying to become a flight-operations manager and eventually vice-president for safety and quality assurance. These men were smart and tough, and managed a team primarily of EgyptAir engineers, many of whom were very sharp.
The U.S. Navy was given the job of salvage, and it in turn hired a contractor named Oceaneering, which arrived with a ship and grapples and remote-controlled submarines. The debris was plotted by sonar, and found to lie in two clusters: the small ‘west field,’ which included the left engine; and, 1,200 feet beyond it in the direction of flight, the ‘east field,’ where most of the airplane lay. From what was known of the radar profile and from the tight concentration of the debris, it began to seem unlikely that an in-flight explosion was to blame. The NTSB said nothing. Nine days after the accident the flight-data recorder – the ‘black box’ that records flight and systems data – was retrieved and sent to the NTSB laboratory in Washington. The NTSB stated tersely that there was preliminary evidence that the initial dive may have been a ‘controlled descent.’ Five days later, on Sunday, 14 November, a senior official at the Egyptian Transportation Ministry – an air-force general and a former EgyptAir pilot – held a news conference in Cairo and, with Rayan at his side, announced that the evidence from the flight-data recorder had been inconclusive but the dive could be explained only by a bomb in the cockpit or in the lavatory directly behind it. It was an odd assertion to make, but of little importance, because
the second black box, the cockpit voice recorder, had been salvaged the night before and was sent on Sunday to the NTSB. The tape was cleaned and processed, and a small group that included a translator (who was not Egyptian) gathered in a listening room at L’Enfant Plaza to hear it through.
Listening to cockpit recordings is a tough and voyeuristic duty, restricted to the principal investigators and people with specific knowledge of the airplane or the pilots, who might help to prepare an accurate transcript. Experienced investigators grow accustomed to the job, but I talked to several who had heard the EgyptAir tape, and they admitted that they had been taken aback. Black boxes are such pitiless, unblinking devices. When the information they contained from Flight 990 was combined with the radar profile and the first, sketchy information on the crew, this was the story it seemed to tell:
The flight lasted thirty-one minutes. During the departure from New York it was captained, as required, by the aircraft commander, a portly senior pilot named Ahmad al-Habashi, fifty-seven, who had flown thirty-six years for the airline. Habashi of course sat in the left seat. In the right seat was the most junior member of the crew, a thirty-six-year-old copilot who was progressing well in his career and looking forward to getting married. Before takeoff the copilot advised the flight attendants by saying, in Arabic, ‘In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. Cabin crew takeoff position.’ This was not unusual.
After takeoff the autopilot did the flying. Habashi and the copilot kept watch, talked to air traffic control, and gossiped about their work. The cockpit door was unlocked, which was fairly standard on Egypt-Air flights. Various flight attendants came in and left; for a while the chief pilot, the man who was deadheading back to Cairo, stopped by the cockpit to chat. Then, twenty minutes into the flight, the ‘cruise’ copilot, Gameel al-Batouti, arrived. Batouti was a big, friendly guy with a reputation for telling jokes and enjoying life. Three months short of sixty, and mandatory retirement, he was unusually old for a copilot. He had joined the airline in his mid-forties, after a career as a flight instructor for the Air Force, and had rejected several opportunities for command. His lack of ambition was odd but not unheard of: his English was poor and might have given him trouble on the necessary exams; moreover, as the company’s senior 767 copilot, he made adequate money and had his pick of long-distance flights. Now he used his seniority to urge the junior copilot to cede the right seat ahead of the scheduled crew change. When the junior man resisted, Batouti said, ‘You mean you’re not going to get up? You will get up. Go and get some rest and come back.’ The junior copilot stayed in his seat a bit longer and then left the cockpit. Batouti took the seat and buckled in.
Batouti was married and had five children. Four of them were grown and doing well. His fifth child was a girl, age ten, who was sick with lupus but responding to treatment that he had arranged for her to receive in Los Angeles. Batouti had a nice house in Cairo. He had a vacation house on the beach. He did not drink heavily. He was moderately religious. He had his retirement planned. He had acquired an automobile tire in New Jersey the day before, and was bringing it home in the cargo hold. He had also picked up some free samples of Viagra, to distribute as gifts.
Captain Habashi was more religious, and was known to pray sometimes in the cockpit. He and Batouti were old friends. Using Batouti’s nickname, he said, in Arabic, ‘How are you, Jimmy?’ They groused to each other about the chief pilot and about a clique of young and arrogant ‘kids,’ junior EgyptAir pilots who were likewise catching a ride back to the Cairo base. One of those pilots came into the cockpit dressed in street clothes. Habashi said, ‘What’s with you? Why did you get all dressed in red like that?’ Presumably the man then left. Batouti had a meal. A female flight attendant came in and offered more. Batouti said pleasantly, ‘No, thank you, it was marvelous.’ She took his tray.
At 1:47 AM the last calls came in from air traffic control, from Ann Brennan, far off in the night at her display. Captain Habashi handled the calls. He said, ‘New York, EgyptAir nine-nine-zero heavy, good morning,’ and she answered with her final ‘EgyptAir nine-ninety, roger.’
At 1:48 Batouti found the junior copilot’s pen and handed it across to Habashi. He said, ‘Look, here’s the new first officer’s pen. Give it to him, please. God spare you.’ He added, ‘To make sure it doesn’t get lost.’ Habashi said, ‘Excuse me, Jimmy, while I take a quick trip to the toilet.’ He ran his electric seat back with a whir. There was the sound of the cockpit door moving. Batouti said, ‘Go ahead, please.’ Habashi said, ‘Before it gets crowded. While they are eating. And I’ll be back to you.’ Again the cockpit door moved. There was a clunk. There was a clink. It seems that Batouti was now alone in the cockpit. The 767 was at 33,000 feet, cruising peacefully eastward at .79 Mach.
At 1:48:30 a strange, word-like sound was uttered, three syllables with emphasis on the second, perhaps more English than Arabic, and variously heard on the tape as ‘control it,’ ‘hydraulic,’ or something unintelligible. The NTSB ran extensive speech and sound-spectrum studies on it, and was never able to assign it conclusively to Batouti or to anyone else. But what is clear is that Batouti then softly said, ‘Tawakkalt ala Allah,’ which proved difficult to translate, and was at first rendered incorrectly, but essentially means ‘I rely on God.’ An electric seat whirred. The autopilot disengaged, and the airplane sailed on as before for another four seconds. Again Batouti said, ‘I rely on God.’ Then two things happened almost simultaneously, according to the flight-data recorder: the throttles in the cockpit moved back fast to minimum idle, and a second later, back at the tail, the airplane’s massive elevators (the pitch-control surfaces) dropped to a three-degrees-down position. When the elevators drop, the tail goes up; and when the tail goes up, the nose points down. Apparently Batouti had chopped the power and pushed the control yoke forward.
The effect was dramatic. The airplane began to dive steeply, dropping its nose so quickly that the environment inside plunged to nearly zero gs, the weightless condition of space. Six times in quick succession Batouti repeated ‘I rely on God.’ His tone was calm. There was a loud thump. As the nose continued to pitch downward, the airplane went into the negative-G range, nudging loose objects against the ceiling. The elevators moved even farther down. Batouti said, ‘I rely on God.’
Somehow, in the midst of this, now sixteen seconds into the dive, Captain Habashi made his way back from the toilet. He yelled, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ Batouti said, ‘I rely on God.’ The wind outside was roaring. The airplane was dropping through 30,800 feet, and accelerating beyond its maximum operating speed of .86 Mach. In the cockpit the altimeters were spinning like cartoon clocks. Warning horns were sounding, warning lights were flashing – low oil pressure on the left engine, and then on the right. The master alarm went off, a loud high-to-low warble. For the last time Batouti said, ‘I rely on God.’
Again Habashi shouted, ‘What’s happening?’ By then he must have reached the left control yoke. The negative Gs ended as he countered the pitch-over, slowing the rate at which the nose was dropping. But the 767 was still angled down steeply, 40 degrees below the horizon, and it was accelerating. The rate of descent hit 39,000 feet a minute. ‘What’s happening, Gameel? What’s happening?’
Habashi was clearly pulling very hard on his control yoke, trying desperately to raise the nose. Even so, thirty seconds into the dive, at 22,200 feet, the airplane hit the speed of sound, at which it was certainly not meant to fly. Many things happened in quick succession in the cockpit. Batouti reached over and shut off the fuel, killing both engines. Habashi screamed, ‘What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engines?’ The throttles were pushed full forward – for no obvious reason, since the engines were dead. The speed-brake handle was then pulled, deploying drag devices on the wings.
At the same time, there was an unusual occurrence back at the tail: the right-side and left-side elevators, which normally move together to control the airplane’s pitch, began to
‘split,’ or move in opposite directions. Specifically: the elevator on the right remained down, while the left-side elevator moved up to a healthy recovery position. That this could happen at all was the result of a design feature meant to allow either pilot to overpower a mechanical jam and control the airplane with only one elevator. The details are complex, but the essence in this case seemed to be that the right elevator was being pushed down by Batouti while the left elevator was being pulled up by the captain. The NTSB concluded that a ‘force fight’ had broken out in the cockpit.
Words were failing Habashi. He yelled, ‘Get away in the engines!’ And then, incredulously,… shut the engines!’ Batouti said calmly, ‘It’s shut.’
Habashi did not have time to make sense of the happenings. He probably did not have time to get into his seat and slide it forward. He must have been standing in the cockpit, leaning over the seatback and hauling on the controls. The commotion was horrendous. He was reacting instinctively as a pilot, yelling, ‘Pull!’ and then, ‘Pull with me! Pull with me! Pull with me!’
It was the last instant captured by the on-board flight recorders. The elevators were split, with the one on the right side, Batouti’s side, still pushed into a nose-down position. The ailerons on both wings had assumed a strange upswept position, normally never seen on an airplane. The 767 was at 16,416 feet, doing 527 miles an hour, and pulling a moderately heavy 2.4 Gs, indicating that the nose, though still below the horizon, was rising fast, and that Habashi’s efforts on the left side were having an effect. A belated recovery was under way. At that point, because the engines had been cut, all nonessential electrical devices were lost, blacking out not only the recorders, which rely on primary power, but also most of the instrument displays and lights. The pilots were left to the darkness of the sky, whether to work together or to fight. I’ve often wondered what happened between those two men during the 114 seconds that remained of their lives. We’ll never know. Radar reconstruction showed that the 767 recovered from the dive at 16,000 feet and, like a great wounded glider, soared steeply back to 24,000 feet, turned to the southeast while beginning to break apart, and shed its useless left engine and some of its skin before giving up for good and diving to its death at high speed.