Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  When this evidence emerged at the NTSB, the American investigators were shocked but also relieved by the obvious conclusion. There was no bomb here. Despite initial fears, there was nothing wrong with the airplane. The apparent cause was pilot error at its extreme: Batouti had gone haywire. Every detail that emerged from the two flight recorders fit that scenario: the sequence of the switches and controls that were moved, the responses of the airplane, and the words that were spoken, however cryptic and incomplete. Batouti had waited to be alone in the cockpit, and had intentionally pushed the airplane to its death. He had even fought the captain’s valiant attempt at recovery. Why? Professionally, the NTSB didn’t need to care. It was up to the criminal investigators at the FBI to discover if this was a political act, or the result of a plot. Even at the time, just weeks after the airplane went down, it was hard to imagine that Batouti had any terrorist connections, and indeed, the FBI never found any such evidence. But in pure aviation terms it didn’t really matter why Batouti did it, and pure aviation is what the NTSB is all about. So this was easy – Crash Investigation 101. The guy to blame was dead. The NTSB wouldn’t have to go after Boeing – a necessary task on occasion, but never a pleasant prospect. The wreckage, which was still being pulled out of the ocean, would not require tedious inspection. The report could be written quickly and filed away, and the NTSB could move on to the backlog of work that might actually affect the future safety of the flying public.

  When Jim Hall, the NTSB chairman, held a news conference to address the initial findings, on November 19, 1999, he was culturally sensitive, responsible, and very strict about the need to maintain an open mind. There had been leaks to the press about the content of the cockpit voice recorder. It was being said that Batouti’s behavior had been strange during the dive and that he had recited Muslim prayers. Hall scolded the assembled reporters for using unofficial information and exciting the public’s emotions. He made a show of being careful with his own choice of words. He said that the accident ‘might, and I emphasize might, be the result of a deliberate act.’ He did not say ‘suicide’ or ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim.’ He did not even say ‘Batouti.’ He said, ‘No one wants to get to the bottom of this mystery quicker than those investigating this accident, both here and in Egypt, but we won’t get there on a road paved with leaks, supposition, speculation, and spin. That road does not lead to the truth, and the truth is what both the American people and the Egyptian people seek.’ It was standard stuff, a prelude to a quick wrapping up of the investigation. The Egyptian delegation, which had moved into rooms at the Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, might have felt grateful to have such a man at the NTSB to guide them through these difficult times. Instead the Egyptians were outraged.

  At the NTSB this came as a surprise. Looking back, it’s possible to see signs of a disconnect, especially the Egyptian government’s baffling speculation about a bomb in the forward lavatory; but just the day before Hall’s press conference the Egyptian ambassador had heaped praise on the NTSB and the investigation. Now, suddenly and with startling vigor, the Egyptian delegation went on the offensive. The leader of the charge, Shaker Kelada, later told me about running across one of the American investigators in the halls of the NTSB. When the investigator mentioned with satisfaction that the work might wrap up within a few weeks, Kelada brought him up short with the news that he’d better change his plans – because far from being over, the investigation had hardly begun.

  First the Egyptians had to prepare the ground: the delegation started to loudly criticize the performance and intentions of Boeing, the FBI, and the entire NTSB. Kelada said that Batouti was the scapegoat, and that this was happening because it was an Egyptian airliner that had gone down. It did not escape Kelada’s attention that the legendary head of aviation investigations at the NTSB – a brilliant and abrasive engineer named Bernard Loeb, who was overseeing the Flight 990 inquiry – was Jewish and something of a Zionist.

  Loeb retired last spring; Kelada implied to me last summer that this was a deception, and that Loeb continued to pull the strings. Loeb laughed when I mentioned it to him afterward. He was looking forward to spending time with his grandchildren. But at the same time, he was angry that Egypt, after receiving $1.3 billion in American assistance every year, would have used any of its budget to cause the United States unnecessary expense by prolonging an investigation that for the NTSB alone had so far cost $17 million. As to Zionism, Loeb did seem bothered by aspects of the Egyptian culture. I got the feeling, though, that his opinion was fresh – that it stemmed from his contacts with EgyptAir, rather than from experiences that had preceded them.

  But it didn’t really matter who at the NTSB was in charge of the investigation. In faraway Cairo, inevitably, it was seen as unfair. From the day that Flight 990’s recorder tape was transcribed and word of its contents began to leak out, the feeling in Egypt was that all Arabs were under attack, and that the assault had been planned. More than a year after the crash I met a sharp young reporter in Cairo who continued to seethe about it. He said, ‘For many Egyptians it was a big example of this business of dictating the reality. What made many people question the authenticity of the U.S. claims was the rush to conclusions… The rush, the interpretation of a few words, it left no chance. The whole thing seemed to apply within a framework of an American sort of soap opera, one of those movies you make. You know – this is a fanatic, he comes from the Middle East, he utters a few religious words, he brings the plane down.’ But what if Batouti really had brought the plane down – where did the reporter’s reaction leave Egypt? Earlier the reporter had written critically about the corruption at EgyptAir, but he refused even to think critically about it anymore.

  The reporter’s anger was similar, at least superficially, to the anger that was seething through Shaker Kelada and the rest of the Egyptian delegation in November of 1999. For Jim Hall, Bernard Loeb, and others at the NTSB, the source of the problem seemed at first to be the media coverage, which was typically overeager. Rumors of suicide had circulated in the press almost since the airplane hit the water, but it was only after the voice recorder was recovered that the reports began to make uninformed reference to Muslim prayers. Three days before Hall’s press conference the Washington Post ran a headline saying, ‘PILOT PRAYED, THEN SHUT OFF JET’S AUTOPILOT.’ Television stations speculated that the ‘prayer’ was the shahada (‘There is no god but God; Muhammad is the messenger of God’), as if this were what one might say before slaughtering infidels. When the actual Arabic words – Tawakkalt ala Allah – became public, some news outlets gave the following translation: ‘I have made my decision. I put my fate in God’s hands.’ This was reported so widely that the NTSB took the unusual step of announcing that ‘I have made my decision’ had never been spoken. By implication, ‘I put my fate…’ had.

  When NTSB investigators explained their lack of control over the American press, the Egyptians scoffed and pointed out – correctly – that the reporters’ sources were people inside the investigation. And anyway, the Egyptians added, what Batouti had said was not ‘I put my fate in God’s hands’ – as the NTSB’s interpreter had claimed – but, rather, ‘I rely on God.’ The investigators blinked at the subtlety of this distinction, and made the necessary changes to the transcript. Then the Egyptians produced a letter from an Islamic scholar in Cairo who certified that the meaning of Tawakkalt ala Allah is ‘I depend in my daily affairs on the omnipotent Allah alone.’ The Egyptians wanted the letter inserted into the record, but were willing to allow ‘I rely on God’ to remain in the transcript. Again, the investigators blinked. This was not the sort of thing they normally dealt with. They tried sometimes to bridge the gap as they might have with Americans, with a nudge and a smile, but it got them nowhere.

  In essence the Egyptians were making two intertwined arguments: first, that it was culturally impossible for Batouti to have done what the NTSB believed; second, that the NTSB lacked the cultural sensitivity to understand what was on the cockpit voi
ce recorder. With those arguments as a starting point, the Egyptians tore into the complexities of the evidence, disputing any assumptions or conclusions the NTSB put forward and raising new questions at every possible turn – a process that continues to this day. They were tenacious. For example (and this is just a small sample of the Egyptians’ arguments): When Batouti said ‘Tawakkalt ala Allah,’ he was not preparing to die but responding in surprise to something wrong with the flight. He said it quietly, yes, but with emotion that the Americans lacked the cultural sensitivity to hear. When he started the dive, he was trying to avoid a plane or a missile outside. If not that, then the airplane went into the dive on its own. When he idled the engines, it was to keep from gaining speed. When he cut the engines, he was going through the required restart procedure, because he erroneously believed – on the basis of the low-oil-pressure warning light that flashed in the cockpit – that the engines had flamed out. Apparently Habashi made the same mistake, which is why he discussed engine cuts. When Habashi called ‘Pull with me!’, Batouti did exactly that. The split elevators were like the upswept ailerons – either an aerodynamic anomaly, resulting from the unknown pressures of ultrahigh-speed flight on the 767, or, more simply, an error in the flight-data recorder. Whichever way, the Egyptians argued that expensive wind-tunnel testing was necessary at high Mach numbers near the speed of sound.

  Meanwhile, most of the wreckage had been recovered and spread out in a hangar in Rhode Island. A second salvage operation was mounted in the spring to coincide with a state visit by Mubarak to Washington. It went to the west debris field and brought up the left engine and a boatload of worthless scraps. At the NTSB a story circulated about Al Gore, who was said to have angered Mubarak by making a casual reference to ‘the suicide flight.’ There was a short flap about that. The investigation continued. The documentation grew. The possibilities multiplied and ran off in a hundred directions. An airline pilot observing the scene said to me, ‘It could have been this, it could have been that. Bottom line is, it could have been anything except their guy.’

  While the Egyptians were proposing theory after theory to absolve Batouti, the FBI was conducting a criminal investigation, collecting evidence that provided for his possible motive. Mostly through interviews with employees of the Pennsylvania Hotel, the FBI found that Batouti had a reputation for sexual impropriety – and not merely by the prudish standards of America. It was reported that on multiple occasions over the previous two years he had been suspected of exposing himself to teenage girls, masturbating in public, following female guests to their rooms, and listening at their doors. Some of the maids, it was said, were afraid of him, and the hotel security guards had once brought him in for questioning and a warning. Apparently the hotel had considered banning him. The FBI learned that EgyptAir was aware of these problems and had warned Batouti to control his behavior. He was not considered to be a dangerous man – and certainly he was more sad than bad. In fact, there was a good side to Batouti that came out in these interviews as well. He was very human. Many people were fond of him, even at the hotel. But a story soon surfaced that an altercation may have occurred during the New York layover before the fatal departure. The FBI was told that there had been trouble, and possibly an argument with the chief pilot, who was also staying at the hotel. It was hypothesized that the chief pilot might have threatened disciplinary action upon arrival back in Cairo – despite the public humiliation that would entail. Was that perhaps Batouti’s motive? Did the killing of 217 people result from a simple act of vengeance against one man? The evidence was shaky at best. Then, in February of 2000, an EgyptAir pilot named Hamdi Hanafi Taha, forty-nine, landed in England and requested political asylum, claiming that he had information on the accident. FBI and NTSB investigators flew immediately to interview him, hoping that he would provide the answers they needed. They were disappointed. Taha told a story that seemed to confirm that Batouti had been confronted by the chief pilot, and he added some new details, but he turned out to be an informant of questionable utility – a radical Muslim who, along with others in the ranks of EgyptAir pilots, had forced the airline to ban the serving of alcohol, and who now went on at length about corruption at EgyptAir, and also what he claimed was rampant alcoholism and drug use among his secular peers. The request for asylum was itself a little flaky. The American investigators flew home without solid information. Most of this came out in the press when the story of Batouti’s sexual improprieties was leaked, further angering the Egyptians. They countered, eventually producing a Boeing 777 captain named Mohamed Badrawi, who had been with the other pilots in New York on the fateful night, and who testified at length that they were like a band of brothers – that Batouti and the chief pilot got along well and had had no direct confrontations. Rather, Badrawi said, he had acted at times as a ‘mediator’ between the two men, cautioning Batouti on behalf of the chief pilot to ‘grow up’ in order to avoid legal problems in the United States.

  With that on the record, assigning a motive to Batouti became all the more difficult. For a variety of reasons, Bernard Loeb thought the FBI was wasting everyone’s time. He did not really oppose the search for a motive, but he was against entering such speculative and easily countered discussions into the NTSB’s public record. Privately he believed in the story of the fight. But as he later emphasized to me, ‘We just didn’t need to go there.’

  Loeb thought the same about much of the investigation. Month after month, as the NTSB chased down the theories that EgyptAir kept proposing, Loeb worried about all the other projects that were being put aside. He tried to keep a sense of distance from the work, driving from suburban Maryland to his office dressed in a sports jacket and tie, just like any other Washingtonian with a quiet job. But it was a hopeless ambition. Most mornings the Egyptian delegation was there too. Later Loeb said to me, his voice strangled with frustration, ‘You had to be there! You had to live through this! Day in and day out! It was as if these people would go back to their rooms at night and then identify some kind of reason… And then it would start all over again. It was insane! It was just insane!’

  To bolster their arguments the Egyptians had hired some former accident investigators and also the retired NTSB chairman Carl Vogt, whose willingness to legitimize the Egyptian campaign was seen by many within the NTSB as a betrayal. The Egyptians also turned to the American pilots’ union – in principle to improve their communication with the NTSB, but in practice probably just to add weight to their side. In the spring of 2000 the union sent to Washington a man named Jim Walters, a U.S. airline pilot with long experience in accident investigations. Walters thought he could patch things up. Later he said to me, ‘The Egyptians appeared to be listening to me. But as it turned out, they weren’t.’ Then he said, ‘I thought I was there to give them advice…’ It was a disappointment. He liked the Egyptians personally, and remained sympathetic to their side even after he left.

  I asked him to describe the scene in Washington. He said, ‘The NTSB isn’t terribly tolerant of people who don’t follow good investigative procedure. And they weren’t used to dealing with a group like this, right in their back yard, with offices in the same building, there every day. I thought, The first thing we have to do is calm everybody down. I thought I could explain to the Egyptians, “This is how the NTSB operates,” and explain to Jim Hall, “Hey, these guys are Egyptians. You’ve got to understand who these guys are, and why they’re doing things the way they are, and maybe we can all just kiss and make up and get along from here.”’

  But it didn’t work out that way. Walters was naive. Kiss and make up? The Egyptians no more needed his advice about investigative procedure than they had needed the NTSB’s opinions about the nature of a free press.

  A small war had broken out between Egypt and the United States on a battlefield called Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel. On one side stood Shaker Kelada and his men, fighting for the honor of their nation against the mysterious forces of American hegemony, and specifically agai
nst an agency whose famed independence they believed had been compromised. On the other side stood Bernard Loeb and his people, fighting just as hard – but to set a schedule, write the report, and disengage. Jim Hall was scurrying in between. And Boeing was off in Seattle, not quite out of range, trying unsuccessfully to look small.

  The irony is that Loeb, too, thought the agency’s independence had been compromised, though for the opposite reason: there were meetings at the White House, and phone calls to Jim Hall, in which concern was expressed about accommodating the Egyptian view, and in which it was implied that there should be no rush to finish a report that inevitably would offend Mubarak. Loeb was disgusted and typically vocal about his opinion. When I asked him if the influence was necessarily so wrong, he said, ‘Next they ask you to change the report – to say Batouti didn’t do it.’ He added, however, that no one had ever suggested such a change – and it was a good thing, too.

  By late last May the fight had slowed, and Shaker Kelada was able to spend most of his time back home in Cairo. The NTSB had just issued a draft report, and Egypt was preparing an opposing response. I found Kelada in his expansive new office at the Cairo airport, where we talked several times over the course of a week. These were not good conversations. Kelada insisted on repeating the official Egyptian positions, and would go no further. At one point he began to attack the New York air traffic controllers, and specifically Ann Brennan, for having walked away from her display. He implied that her absence had a bearing on the accident, or perhaps sparked a subsequent cover-up by the American government. He said, ‘It was very sloppy air-traffic control, and not what the U.S. wants to show. They’re number one at everything, and they don’t want anyone to know that they have a sloppy operation in New York.’