Here is the DEBKAfile Analysis January 3, 2004 of a crash this week, of Egypt's Air Flash Too Soon to Dismiss Terror as Cause of Egyptian Air Disaster Hours after an privately chartered Egyptian airplane crashed in the Red Sea January 3, just after takeoff from Sharm el-Sheikh, French Justice Minister Dominique Perben asked prosecutors to open a preliminary inquiry for manslaughter of the 148 killed, most were French tourists with their families, bound for Charles de Gaulle after a refueling stop at Cairo. DEBKAfile's aviation experts say the investigators will be called upon to consider a host of anomalies before they say it is NOT terrorism. The Egyptian plane vanished abruptly from radar screens without sending out a distress call. It looked as though the craft had plummeted into the sea suddenly. The Sharm el-Sheikh air disaster recalls the last Egyptian air disaster in 1999 when EgyptAir's 990 Boeing 767 crashed opposite the American coast of Massachusetts shortly after takeoff, killing all 217 aboard. US aviation authorities established that the co-pilot, Jamil Batouty, who was not supposed to be on duty at the time, took over the controls and put the plane into a sharp nosedive shouting Allah is Great! in Arabic. A large group of Egyptian officers were aboard 990, flying home from counter-terror combat and fighter jets courses in the United States. Batouty has been assigned by his Egyptian Jihad Islami connections in Los Angeles and Cairo to carry out a kamikaze mission to destroy this group. British prime minister Tony Blair was vacationing at the Sharm el-Sheikh resort with his family. From the moment the disaster was reported, no word was released about their whereabouts. DEBKAfile Analysis January 3, 2004. Note: ZionsCry analysis said some of this January 2, prior to the Debka analysis. - The Crash of Egypt Air Flash in 2004 :Debka
CRASH of EGYPT AIR Flight 990 in 1999 The Crash of EgyptAir 990 October 31, 1999, Halloween morning. Two years afterward the U.S. and Egyptian governments are still quarreling over the cause-a clash that grows out of cultural division, not factual uncertainty. A look at the flight data from a pilot's perspective, with the help of simulations of the accident, points to what the Egyptians already know: the crash was caused not by any mechanical failure but by a pilot's intentional act. by William Langewiesche November 2001 EgyptAir 990 :Langewiesche
The flight-data and cockpit voice recorders were recovered within weeks, and the story they told seemed shocking but conclusive: at a moment when the captain was out of the cockpit, the copilot, Gameel al-Batouti, disengaged the autopilot and calmly pushed the airplane into a steep dive. When the captain returned, Batouti fought him for control of the airplane - and then turned off the engines. But the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), charged with investigating the crash, soon realized that what they had thought would be a simple, open and shut case would actually require all of the political and diplomatic skills they could muster. The Egyptian investigators professed outrage at the idea that the crash would be called intentional, which they seemed to feel was a cultural slight, setting off a conflict with the NTSB that continues to this day. NTSB, with the help of Boeing, performed extensive tests to see if any of the theories matched the flight's profile. None of them did. Looking at the flight data, flying simulations of the crash, meeting with the NTSB, and traveling to Cairo to interview the Egyptian investigators. His piece is not so much the story of an airplane accident as it is the story of the cultural clash between the NTSB and the Egyptians-a clash that has big implications for relations between the U.S., Egypt, and the Middle East as a whole. During the investigation into the crash of Flight 990, there was such a disconnect between the NTSB and the Egyptian investigators that they may as well have been talking about two different accidents. Could you talk about the roots of this disconnect? How could they see the same accident in such radically different ways? Egyptians knew very well that their man, Batouti, had dove the plane into the sea on purpose. They were pursuing a political agenda that was driven by the need to answer to their higher-ups in a very pyramidal, autocratic political structure. November, 2001 conversation with William Langewiesche, the author of The Crash of EgyptAir 990, on the cultural reverberations of a seemingly straightforward airplane crash. The Crash of EgyptAir 990:
Families of EgyptAir 990, Inc. This web site was initially developed by Rod Booher, and is maintained by the Families of EgyptAir 990 Contact the Family Association: Jim Brokaw, President, jbms990@yahoo.com rbooher1@home.com The Crash of EgyptAir 990:
On October 31, 1999, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990 Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down 2 people from Los Angeles on July 4th at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles, and wounded 7 others, is a Muslim extremist. (DEBKAfile's intelligence - debka.com ) During his ten years in the United States, Hadayat was a secret operative of the Egyptian Jihad who maintained links to the same Jihad cell in Brooklyn, New York, as the blind sheikh Abdul Rahim Rahman and Ramzi Yousef, who perpetrated the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993. Hadayat also involved in a previous airline disaster, the Egyptair Flight 990, which also took off from Los Angeles airport for Kennedy, New York (Interesting website) The Crash of EgyptAir 990:
RELIGION IN THE NEWS William K. Piotrowski Spring 2000 The Crash of EgyptAir 990:
So what did Congress do in the face of the crashes of TWA 800, Swissair 111 (in Canadian waters), and Egyptair 990? Congress made DOHSA applicable to only some of them! The Crash of EgyptAir 990:
