Strangers Speculate About 214 Feared Dead in EgyptAir Crash
Bodies, Debris Found Off Nantucket Island
By Press
BOSTON (Oct. 31) - An EgyptAir plane with 214 people on board crashed at sea off the island of Nantucket early Sunday on a flight from New York to Egypt, and bodies and wreckage were found in the water.
EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767, plummeted from radar screens while heading to Cairo on a flight that originated in Los Angeles.
Debris was found about 60 miles south of Nantucket, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Richard M. Larrabee said at a midmorning news conference in Boston. He said the operation was still considered a search and rescue effort.
'The initial report was we had found seats, seat cushions, the flotation devices on the aircraft, life rafts and some other small parts that are not identifiable,' Larrabee said.
More than one body had been found by late morning, said Robert Kelly, aviation director for Port Authority, which runs New York's Kennedy airport, at a news conference in New York.
At a news conference in Cairo, EgyptAir head Mohammed Fahim Rayan was asked about reports that the Federal Aviation Administration had warned his airline about a terrorist threat. He said: 'We take all precautions and we have plenty of warnings from everybody, including the FAA.'
A U.S. intelligence official said at midmorning Sunday that agencies were pursuing the possibility of sabotage, but 'There's nothing to immediately point toward that.' Another official said there had been no recent threat that seemed relevant to the EgyptAir disappearance.
Rayan and Larrabee said they had no knowledge of any SOS from the crew.
'Contact with the plane was cut suddenly which indicates that something happened suddenly,' Ibrahim el-Dimeiri, Egypt's minister of transport, communications and civil aviation, said in Cairo.
It was the airline's first fatal crash, Rayan said.
Armed security guards routinely fly on EgyptAir flights. After the airline's passengers go through the normal airport security check, they are again subjected to baggage search just before they board the aircraft.
There were 199 passengers on the flight, including two infants, plus 15 crew members, the airline said.
Rayan said the passengers included 62 Egyptians, two Sudanese, three Syrians and one Chilean. There was no record of the nationality of 131 others, and Rayan said he believed some of those were Americans.
Flight 990 took off from New York's Kennedy International Airport at 1:19 a.m. EST and disappeared from radar at 2 a.m. while flying at 33,000 feet, said Eliot Brenner, chief spokesman for the FAA in Washington.
An official familiar with air traffic control, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said controllers in the Boston Center in Nashua, N.H., who were observing the flight but not directly controlling it, saw the plane when it was at 33,000 feet.
The controllers said that during a second radar sweep 12 seconds later, the plane had dropped to 26,600 feet, and in a third sweep 12 seconds later, the plane was at 19,100 feet - a drop of 13,900 feet in 24 seconds.
At the time of the disappearance, the plane was being controlled by the New York Center in Ronkonkoma, N.Y.
Weather at Nantucket was clear with 9 miles of visibility and wind of 9 mph, the National Weather Service said.
Larrabee said the search conditions were excellent with 2- to 3-foot seas, and a water temperature estimated at 59 degrees.
The Navy was preparing to send the USS Grapple to the site, according to an administration official in Washington. The Grapple, based at Little Creek, Va., is a search and rescue vessel that participated in the recovery of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane off Martha's Vineyard this summer.
The EgyptAir plane was on a route similar to the one taken by Swissair Flight 111, a McDonnell Douglas MD11, which crashed off Nova Scotia on Sept. 2, 1998, killing all 229 people aboard. Planes on that route fly from Kennedy to Nantucket, then turn north to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland before heading east across the Atlantic.
At Cairo Airport, relatives and friends gathered to await news.
A Cairo travel agent, Ala Mansour, said he was planning to pick up a couple from Montreal due to arrive on the flight. 'This is very bad news,' Mansour said. 'I was just going to the airport to meet my clients.'
And at Kennedy, two families had gathered at an airport hotel, said James Devine, a Catholic chaplain at the airport. One family was Egyptian and the other American.
'They are really in shock,' Devine said.
The plane was a Boeing 767-300ER delivered to the airline in September 1989, said Boeing spokeswoman Barbara Murphy in Seattle. Rayan said the plane had 33,334 flight hours and its condition was 'good'
EgyptAir, founded in 1932 as Misr Airwork, has a fleet of 38 planes and flies to some 85 airports around the world.
Critics have called for the privatization of the company, one of the oldest in Africa and the Middle East, amid reports of bad management and bad service.
Sunday's crash comes after the Oct. 19 hijack of an EgyptAir flight between Istanbul and Cairo. That hijacking ended peacefully in Germany where the hijacker was overpowered; none of the 46 passengers on board was harmed.
The Boeing 767 is a twin-engine, wide-body passenger jet that went into passenger use in September 1982.
Previously, a Boeing 767 crashed on May 26, 1991, in Thailand. The Lauda Air plane went down after one of its engine thrust reversers accidentally deployed during a climb, killing all 10 crew and 213 passengers.
In addition, an Ethiopian Airlines 767 crashed near the Comoros Islands on Nov. 23, 1996, while attempting to land after being hijacked. Ten of the 12 crew members and 117 of the 160 passengers were killed. The three hijackers apparently died.
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