The Mystery Of EgyptAir Flight 990 Crashing Into Atlantic Ocean | Mayday | Wonder

paper was light gold in medieval times i want tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong [Music] a boeing 767 cruises high above the atlantic ocean on its way to egypt 217 people are on board just half an hour after takeoff disaster strikes the pilot and co-pilots struggle desperately for control of their aircraft the lives of all on board will depend on these two pilots and what they do about this dive towards the ocean we're not getting any options we are in an emergency the john f kennedy international airport outside new york city is one of the busiest airports in the world in 1999 nearly 32 million passengers fly in and out more than 340 000 flights take off and land egypt air flight 990 is destined to be one of the most controversial ever to leave this airport [Music] the fate of this flight challenges the strength of an international friendship between two allies and uncovers a hidden mechanical flaw in one of the world's most popular airliners the fbi will become involved we reviewed surveillance tapes to in to indicate whether or not anything unusual was loaded on that plane investigators in two countries developed two different theories was this a tragic accident or a terrible crime just after 1am on october the 31st 1999 the 217 people on board egypt air flight 990 are waiting for takeoff the flight's command captain is captain ahmed al-habashi he's been with egypt air for 36 years the command first officer is 36 year old adel anwar he switched duty with another co-pilot so he could return home in time for his wedding soon be a married man congratulations thank you very much the airline's chief pilot for the boeing 767 captain hatim rusty joins them in the cockpit [Music] at 20 past one in the morning first officer adele anwar is going through his take-off clearance with air traffic control following gateway clear for takeoff runway two-two right egypt 990 heavy crew advised in the name of god the merciful the compassionate cabin crew take off position after an everyday blessing the co-pilot assists the takeoff for safety both pilots push the throttles on a flight of 10 hours it's standard practice at egypt air to provide a relief crew to share the flying duties the command crew takes off and lands the relief crew flies the middle portion tonight captain rauf nureldeen and first officer gamil el batuti are the relief crew they will take over after the first three or four hours and fly the plane until shortly before cairo v1 rotate positive rate of climb both sides 1000. egypt a large number of passengers are senior citizens from the united states looking forward to touring the wonders of ancient egypt my dad and ginny were married in 1998 on october 23rd and to celebrate their first anniversary they decided to take a trip to egypt anita child's parents are retired and on their way to egypt as well they always had great time on these tours they traveled frequently and so it was a pleasure trip they were looking forward to seeing the holy land especially maureen sacratini and her brother john simer enjoyed the fact that their parents loved to travel they had been particularly fond of a program known as elder hostel and this particular vacation trip uh to visit the pyramids and the other um historical uh sites in egypt was an elder hostile trip there are 14 of egypt air's experienced crew operating the flight there are also 33 egyptian military officers and pilots on board returning after training with the american armed forces gamil el batuti used to be an egyptian air force flight instructor he's now one of the oldest first officers at egypt air he's so much older than the other co-pilots that out of respect they call him captain but sam and egypt air think that captain albatuty has been coasting too long on the favors of old friends just over 20 minutes after takeoff albatuty is about to leave his seat former national transportation safety board investigator greg phillips became an expert on the events of this flight the relief first officer who would have been expected to come to the cockpit somewhere during the later part of the flight halfway or wherever he was comfortable whoever the normal change would have been came into the cockpit about 20 minutes after takeoff hello jimmy how are you what you said what's new i i slept i swear just wait let me tell you something i'm not going to sleep at all i might come sit for two hours one day i i slept i i slept you mean you're not going to get up you will get up go and take some rest and come back you should have told me this you should have told me this captain gamer you should have said adele did i even see you i will work first just leave me a message the younger first officer seems surprised that el batuti wants to replace him so early in the flight i'm not sleepy so you take your time sleeping and when you wake up whenever you wake up you come back captain okay i'll come either way come and work the last few hours and that's all it's not like that that's not the point look if you want to sit here there's no problem i'll come back to you i'll go get something to eat and come back all right fine fine look here why don't you go why don't they bring your dinner to you here and then i'll go sleep okay that's good okay with your permission captain and with that albatuty leaves to get his meal do you see how he does whatever he pleases do you know where that is captain el habashi senses his first officer's resentment and tries to smooth over the situation anwar wonders if el batuti wants to take over because he may not want to work with relief captain nour el dean doesn't he want to work with ralph or what it's possible it's possible god knows but look you shouldn't get upset right by this prophet he's just talking nonsense everything's under control okay chief thanks a day first officer anwar concedes and is ready to hand over to el batuti normally this is the most relaxed easy part of a long flight for pilots and passengers alike the highly automated aircraft systems will take care of the flying for several hours it's very unusual for an airplane flying over the atlantic at night time to encounter any kind of difficulties we normally expect accidents to happen and approach our landing or near airports and very seldom do we get anything out over the ocean in the middle of the night [Music] excuse me jimmy while i take a quick trip to the toilet go ahead please before it gets grounded while they're still eating i'll be back to you before the captain returns disaster will strike egypt air flight 990 the fate of everyone on board will be in the hands of the co-pilot the man who shouldn't be here in the first place [Music] on a boeing 767 bound for cairo egypt airs flight 990 appears to be cruising smoothly over the atlantic the relief first officer gamil el batuti is alone in the cockpit while the captain has gone to the washroom but then the plane dips plunging down the nose pitches down creating 0g weightlessness throughout the aircraft this airplane basically started at 1g which is what we expect for level cruise flight as you push the nose down as if you would be cresting the top of a hill in a car at a high speed that drops away you'd feel the airplane fall away from you and you would start to feel a little light in the seat and as the dive progressed you would you would feel a little bit lighter yet whatever the first officer is intending he says nothing except this phrase again and again captain el habashi fights the disorientation of zero gravity desperately trying to return to the cockpit an american journalist living in france studied this flight extensively 16 seconds after the dive began when the airplane had gone into zero g and into negative g and was at an extreme angle the captain somehow made his way back into the cockpit how he did that physically i will never know warning signals indicate the dive is exceeding the maximum speed allowed for the plane taking them to 99 of the speed of sound this far past the plane's design limits the stresses on the airframe are pulling it apart what's happening then he tries to use the engines to power their way out of the dive by pushing forward on the throttles but he gets nothing you shut up desperate the captain deploys the speed brakes panels standing up from the wings in an effort to slow the dive the dive is slowing back from the brink of the sound barrier the dive goes on but the nose is coming up in just seconds they go from zero g to double the force of gravity captain el habashi struggles to level the plane and pulls back hard on the control column the 767's dive begins to slow in seconds the engines stop and the power goes off plunging the aircraft into darkness here the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder stop no one knows what happened in the plane during the next two minutes but radar tracks its path the plane is climbing again up from about five thousand meters to over seven and a half thousand meters as the aircraft's structure is weakened by the stresses of abnormal speeds and maneuvers then the aircraft falls into another terrifying dive stressed beyond endurance the left engine is ripped from the planetary at 1 52 a.m flight 990 disappears from radar screens crashing into the surface of the atlantic ocean some hundred kilometers off the american coast coast guard search and rescue get a call at 2 15 am a plane has disappeared and coast guard vessels are called to the scene the us merchant marine training vessel king's pointer is first to arrive just as the day was dawning we noticed oil in the water and that was the first indication so we turned the ship around back into the oil and about as soon as we turned around we started seeing debris rise up to the surface in heliopolis acaro suburb captain alhabashi's daughter can only guess what her father went through can you imagine if you have a beloved one a father a daughter or a brother facing all the horrors of finding himself falling from 36 000 feet suddenly trying to save his life his colleagues lives the people the passengers in a home in maryland a sleepy sunday morning takes a tragic turn i had woken up for some reason at 5 30 in the morning and we were flipping on the tv to check the weather just and we were deciding what mass we're going to be going to it was sunday and immediately on cnn they had flight 990 missing and i was in total shock i ran down to my refrigerator where i had my parents itinerary and i ripped it off and just started sobbing uncontrollably i was screaming i didn't know what to do we located a significant debris field and that we have concentrated our search efforts since then on about a 36 square mile of area about 50 miles south of nantucket at the end of october the waters of the north atlantic are so cold that normal life expectancy is about five to six hours in cairo relief captain ralph nureldeen's daughter may clung to hope for her father i was talking to myself trying to convince myself that my father was not on this plane and if he's on this plane he will be safe because my father was an air force pilot he had a very good experience and i thought maybe if the plane crashed he will be able to you know to to be in a safe place and to swim and to go to any land at the crash site all that's left is pieces within hours authorities know there's little hope for survivors we believe at this point that it is in everyone's best interest to no longer expect it we will find survivors in this case egyptian president hosni mubarak reaches out to a stricken nation this is the worst air crash in egypt's history relay was shocked it's a big tragedy for us and i give my condolences to all the passengers to the families the families of the crews who have been lost in this tragedy and have contact with president clinton and other agencies and he's giving good support for trying to find investigate see what was the reason the american president would answer his ally with a commitment and i spoke earlier with president mubarak of egypt today to express my condolences and assure him that we would be working together closely until this matter is resolved we do not know what caused this tragedy in northern indiana music historian jim brokaw learned what happened to his father and stepmother one of the many things that i felt on that first horrible morning was the sense that people all over the world were confronting the same horrible circumstances that i was and had the same sense of helplessness and disorientation that i did shocked and grieving relatives arrive at newport rhode island they will seek answers and share comfort there were 100 americans 89 egyptians 21 canadians and seven victims of other nationalities on board they're all asking what caused this tragedy [Music] teams of investigators will pursue that question for years to come we are beginning what may be a long investigation and we are prepared to do what it takes to find the answers to the questions we are seeking in washington greg phillips from the national transportation safety board leads the investigation into this crash from the very beginning we realized it was a very difficult case the airplane was in cruise nighttime out over the ocean and when it went into the ocean there was just a little bit of floating debris but we had to recover the airplane from the bottom of the ocean to begin the investigation the job of finding the black boxes would be difficult the water is about 70 meters deep and the tremendous force of the crash has smashed the locator beacons off the boxes in this case both the uh the underwater locators which are called fingers uh which help us locate the boxes underwater were detached so we were we had an extra difficult job in trying to find the actual boxes where the recording material was contained nine days after the crash the us navy's unmanned submarine deep drone recovers the first of the two black boxes the flight data recorder which stores information about what the aircraft and its systems were doing four days later the second black box the cockpit voice recorder lands on the deck and is carefully transported to the ntsb laboratories the cockpit voice recorder captures all sounds in the cockpit for the last 30 minutes of the flight the black boxes are protected to withstand impacts of 3 400 times the force of gravity the recovery of the cockpit voice recorder provided a gripping and bewildering picture of the last minutes of a disaster here investigators hope is the key to unlock the mystery of flight 990 translating the arabic spoken in the cockpit is a top priority at ntsb headquarters the cockpit voice recorder was good quality it was easily usable and translatable by the investigation team the cockpit voice recorder is always just a piece of the investigation that fits many other pieces of the puzzle that goes along with flight data recorded data examination the wreckage and all the other aspects of investigation [Music] on major investigations like the crash of egyptair 990 the ntsb works routinely with the fbi the physical evidence has to be managed in case it's needed in court former fbi assistant director lou chalero is a veteran investigator and no stranger to air crashes by the time egypt era occurred we were fairly adept at looking at airline disasters particularly with the view of developing whether or not a terrorist incident or criminal act had occurred the fbi checked for evidence of bombs terrorists or terrorist targets on the flight trying to determine luggage against the passenger list and whether or not there was anything unusual in the manifest whether or not the people that loaded the plane could recall anything that would have caused them concern we reviewed surveillance tapes to in to indicate whether or not anything unusual was loaded on that plane we had no evidence at all of any explosive device on board egypt air that night at the ntsb american investigators found no fault in the aircraft from studying the flight data recorder but egypt's members of the investigation team insisted that not all the evidence was in much of the wreckage was still in storage on rhode island they hope the cause of the crash can be found here egypt's representatives search for any possible mechanical cause for the crash while they search other theories are pursued a study into the causes of airline crashes published in january 2001 points to pilot error as the cause of one-third of these accidents it also finds a strong connection between bad weather and pilot error but the crash of egypt air 990 occurred in clear weather with veteran pilots what happened in the cockpit would divide the investigation and fuel an international controversy october 1999 egypt air flight 990 crashes into the atlantic ocean killing all 217 people on board the investigation develops in two directions fault in the airplane and pilot action rumors swirl about what or who may have caused this terrible crash one of the key questions why was the relief first officer in the cockpit hours earlier than expected he was supposed to replace adele anwar much later in the flight but in cairo adele anwar's older brother tarak has no problem with adele being replaced in the cockpit suppose i was one of my friends and we are traveling in a car and he asks me if he can drive instead of me is this going to be a problem for example if a adult didn't get enough sleep and captain jamil told him let me fly the plane instead of you and you go rest there is no problem with that when the actions in the cockpit are put together with the voices recorded a timeline emerges that indicates a series of initially bewildering decisions i'll be back to you the timeline reveals that after captain el habashi leaves the cockpit there's a series of sounds whose meaning can only be guessed at [Music] and then the relief first officer disconnects the autopilot released from the autopilot's control the plane starts to descend rolling to the left egypt's experts described el batuti's decision to shut off the autopilot as a possible reaction to an unusual movement of the aircraft prompting him to take manual control however the leader of the ntsb investigation disagrees we found no reason for the autopilot to be disconnected by a fault or failure in the airplane normally all aircraft movements are meant to keep passengers comfortable as though they were on the ground after switching off the autopilot elbatuti pushes his control column forward lowering the elevator panels so the flight data recorder indicates to the ntsb then he pulls the throttles back reducing engine power this causes the plane to dive egypt's investigators say elbatuti was not trying to crash the plane and there may have been an elevator failure which he could not overcome strangely there is no discussion of a problem on the cockpit tape when the captain made his way back to the cockpit he asked the first officer what was going on and never received a response as former director of aviation safety bernard loeb oversaw all air crash investigations of the ntsb it is well understood that in a in a cockpit a jet transport cockpit of virtually any airline in the world when a captain comes in and asks a question the first officer will respond when the captain asked his questions but tutti did not respond fighting the dive pulling his column back all the way the captain cannot gain complete control of the elevator so he tries the throttles to power out of the dive he was unaware that seconds earlier the first officer had shut off the fuel to the engines egypt's experts say that elba tutti may have been acting out of caution the flight data show that a low oil pressure warning appeared that can mean the engines have flamed out the captain may have then ordered the fuel to the engines shut off as part of the procedure for restarting the engines the ntsb consider this possible scenario as well the engines shut off on a two-engine airplane at night over the water we couldn't understand any reason why any emergency could cause you to shut all the power off available to the airplane when you're heading away from the nearest airport foremost among the egyptian investigators scenarios was a tragic elevator failure [Music] in washington at the national transportation safety board analysis of the flight data recorder indicates that captain alhabashi was pulling back on his column to make the plane climb while first officer el batuti appears to be pushing forward on his column making the plane go down elevators work simply pull back on the column and the elevators go up lifting the plane push forward and the elevator panels move down to make the plane descend they work together but in this case they're going in opposite directions egypt's experts argued that this crash could have been caused by a failure in the elevator assembly producing an elevator hard over a jam in the elevator controls which lock them in the down position plunging the aircraft into an uncontrollable dive they stated that first officer el batuti was working to regain control of the elevators and added that he and captain alhabashi were working together if there had been an elevator failure it could explain the first officer's unusual performance in the cockpit supporting evidence is found when analyzing fragments of the wreckage in the hangar at rhode island here investigators made a remarkable discovery three unusually sheared rivets [Music] these tiny parts play an important role in the boeing 767 elevator assembly egypt's consulting experts determined that the scratches in the metal surfaces of these rivets showed that they were sheared off in two different directions one direction could be attributed to the crash the second could indicate that the break occurred before the crash and so may have indicated a jam in the elevators egypt's experts drew this to the attention of the federal aviation administration america's civil aviation regulator alarmed by the potential risks the faa ordered all bellcrank rivets to be inspected on every boeing 767 in operation around the world the inspections uncovered 136 sheared rivets and 34 aircraft were grounded until the fault was fixed the faa said the problem could result in loss of controllability of the airplane egypt's investigators had uncovered a credible sounding scenario that the sheared rivets in the elevator assembly of the boeing 767 indicated a jam that could have caused an elevator hard over that the pilots could not overcome ntsb investigator greg phillips disagreed those are by design for the boeing 767 the controls can be split they're designed that way in case one of the surfaces the control surfaces fails so that whoever is still in control of the airplane or can control the airplane with a failed elevator before he became an investigative writer william langowiesha was a commercial airline pilot flight 990s maneuvers are programmed into a flight simulator in order for langawisha to test a pilot's reactions to see an airplane going so wildly into a dive to see the altimeters unwinding at that speed to hear the horns and warning signals going off is frightening whatever the cause of the dive langawisha tries a variety of responses to recover from it finally they asked me to wait at the extreme 15 seconds to sit in the 767 or any airplane going out of control and do nothing for 15 seconds 15 seconds is a long time it's inconceivable but i did it and even at 15 seconds even waiting 15 seconds i was able through no particular skill really reacting as any almost as any student pilot would to recover the airplane recover from the dive before the airplane exceeded its limits no boeing 767 has suffered from an elevator hard over and dive before or since the crash the aviation experts hired by egypt developed a wide range of scenarios citing a fault in the elevator assembly as a possible cause of the crash based on the data the information we have from the testing that was done is a group effort with all the best thinking everybody had at the time we could not make this airplane do what it did with any of the failure scenarios that were presented to us while mechanical failure scenarios were exhausted and terrorism was excluded the fbi continued to dig into the life of first officer gamil albatuti less than three weeks after the disaster news media report that in the final moments before the crash albatuty said i have made my decision i put my faith in god causing many to believe he might be an islamic militant bent on destruction but the translation was incorrect from our initial review of batuti's background he was a fairly religious person but but i i don't think we had anything to determine that his religious beliefs were radical or beyond what um would have been a normal religious person what had batuti said and what does it mean egyptian professor amin bonnar teaches arabic at georgetown university in washington [Music] means i depend i rely i trust and allah on and allah is god on god i rely i depend in whatever i'm going to be embarking on people use it when they start a trip when you start driving going back home you say tawa kel allah when you have an exam you begin by saying it's a very positive face so it's not the kind of phrase that anyone would be using before they commit a crime or before they commit suicide to say this common phrase once was normal but albatuty repeated it 11 times what's happening i expect that captain batuti would say there is a fire in the engines there's something stopped i can see something is hitting the plane anything like that but he go on and endlessly saying this is not logic for the elbatuti family their grief would be compounded by the need to defend their father's honor when he died the one thing we had to reassure us was that he had died honorably and now they're trying to take that away from us there is a lot of mechanical failures why why you have to only to to say that it's a deliberate act a deliberate no mechanical no weather no mechanical no weather so why because he's an egyptian pilot chairman jim hall allowed that it could have been a criminal act rather than an accident the investigation could end up in the hands of the fbi alone it is only prudent for the national transportation safety board to consult with these experts and officials to fully evaluate this information prior to any final decision on whether the responsibility for this investigation should transfer to the federal bureau of investigation egypt's president hosni mubarak formerly commander of the egyptian air force had known gamil el batuti according to his nephew waleed mubarak asked president bill clinton to intercede to keep the crash from becoming an fbi matter since the crash walid albatuti nephew of gamil has become the elbatuti family spokesman you have to understand that the highest ranking in this country in this country which is the egyptian president was an air force pilot and he was he was asked and he says according to my experience it's in the tail unit something happened there it's not suicide it could be either a mechanical failure a manufacturing field something in america the fbi focuses on gamil elbatuti and the question of motive the fbi would learn about the man in control of egypt air 990 interviewing colleagues and friends discovering a dark side to gamil el batuti investigating the cause of the crash of egypt air 990 the spotlight falls on the character and history of relief first officer gamil el batuti he was 59 years old approaching 60 had never risen above the rank of first officer that may have caused him some animosity towards egypt there had some personal issues in his in his in his own life in terms of financial um some issues in terms of his family members being sick needing medical attention they've used the daughter and the accusation as they said she was sick and and that's why maybe he committed suicide let me can i can before we go to this i will give you the reason first the doctors have already on that particular flight have already told them that your daughter is going positive with the medication and everything is going fine and he was extremely happy he was so excited to come back gamil el batuti was bringing her medical records back that night among other things okay he bought tires for his son and an argument went on on the phone between him and his son we can gave michael my father called me to come to the airport because he could not carry all four tires himself he says listen i carry your tires all the way from the states you don't want to come and carry it from the airport it's a very natural thing a man is going to commit suicide why would he do this in new york the fbi continued their investigation at the hotel pennsylvania where egypt air had a block booking of about 50 rooms for their crews the investigation that the fbi was able to do as far as maturity's background probably spanned uh a period of about a year or so at least from the records um that we were able to to obtain and from the interviews we did at the various places that he stayed so he did have i think a propensity to engage in behavior with some of the hotel people in terms of sexual misconduct hey pretty lady where did you get to which you know at the time really appeared to be totally out of the out of the realm of what was normal for a person of that status to do a husband and father of five gamil albatuty was notorious for leering at and bothering female guests and hotel staff the fbi learned that two years before the crash two young women reported that he called them on their hotel room phone telling them to look out the window across the courtyard when they did they saw elbatuti exposing himself and reported the incident to hotel security his provocative behavior would continue [Music] a hotel maid told the fbi that the night before the crash of egypt air 990 el batuti had sexually harassed her again no i want to talk to you because look i give you a hundred dollars if you just come to my room i'm not here for that oh sure i'm here to work just leave me alone don't be like that when the maid reported the approach another addition was made to the hotel's record of sexual harassment of guests and staff by albatuti the allegation of the hotel as as far as this they said it happened way before not one day before the flight not one day before the flight as as has been mentioned the hotel maid told the fbi the incident took place on october the 29th 1999 the day before the flight months after the fbi began investigating al batuti an egypt air flight landed in london the plane's captain requested political asylum in the united kingdom he claimed to have information about the cause of the crash of egypt's air 990 and he feared reprisals in egypt captain hamdi tahar was a colleague of gamil albatuti and he was walking away from his wife his family and his country the fbi sent a special agent and along with a british security officer he interviewed captain taha were you aware of albertudi displaying sexually inappropriate behavior yes this is very important i heard it from pilots who i trust but tutti got into trouble for sexual misbehavior in new york with maids and following women and so on the airline tolerated this for a while and they told him several times maybe you can get away with this normally but this is america you represent our country you cannot do these things captain tahar's information was second hand but his description of el batuti meeting with the airline's chief pilot was intriguing went to see batuti the night they took flight 990. they had a meeting in the hotel he told him that what he had done could not be covered up and something had to be done the flight back to cairo from new york would be his last flight camille we go back many years together but this will be your last flight to the united states he would not be flying to america any more but tutti had just had these big privileges taken away from him and he was humiliated so i think that what happened was this he must have said to himself if this is going to be my last flight it will be hatham rusty's last flight also certainly within various corporations where people bring weapons into the office and attempt to take revenge against people that they feel have aggrieved them perhaps patuti felt that egypt air had been the cause of some of his issues and and unfortunately in this case it was it was the kind of office that was flying at 33 000 feet the fbi provides tahar's interviews to the ntsb egyptian officials asked for another egypt air pilot to be interviewed mohamed badrawi had known albatuti for 40 years interviewed at the ntsb he described discussing with captain rushdie what to do about el batuti's behavior do you know if atom rooster was aware of this the situation with batuti well of course he knew but he pretended not to know i think because adam rushdie is the chief but rawi confirms that hatem rushdie is upset about elbatuti's harassment of women at the hotel so badrawi takes rusty's concerns to his old friend and if he didn't listen to you what did you tell him was going to happen nothing much really you see he was on his way out we don't normally touch people when they're approaching 60. no i know i'm not saying that you are doing something wrong they are saying that you're doing something wrong i know you are my friend we have a little patience and then they're out but drowie would ask rushdie to be patient with his old friend considering that albatuti only had three months to go before retirement we've been in the air force for 40 years all he needs is a few more months badrawi's interview confirmed that rushdie did believe albatuty's behavior had to be dealt with and he denied tahar's claim of a meeting between the two on the night of the crash but captain taha was not done he had another compelling story to add [Music] in london an egyptian pilot has requested political asylum and is offering an insider's view of the most controversial tragedy in the history of egypt air captain taha revealed to the fbi how egypt air briefed its pilots about the crash when they had done the transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder the egypt air chief of operations called all flight crew to a special meeting in cairo and told us the facts just the facts no commentary no explanation of any technical problem he did not say anything but all we pilots realized that this was not an accident and then he told us not to talk to anyone about it don't talk to your family don't talk on the phone don't talk to each other he told us all of us realized that patuti had done this on purpose for the american families involved this was a case of 216 murders and one suicide in egypt big close extended families combined with a strong religious faith to deny that egyptians commit suicide [Music] story has many sides it has to do with with religion it has to do with uh beliefs it has to do with the culture i think until today still in the egyptian culture people don't believe that muslims or that egyptians or that people coming from that culture uh commit suicide cultural differences were not the only impediments to this investigation one of the difficulties that we did have was that when we went over to egypt and attempted to really get into his background it became a very sensitive issue for the egyptian government fbi efforts to learn about albatuti's personal life and family relations would be stymied it became almost to the point where we were never really able to develop all the things that we needed to to get at finally on march the 21st 2002 after a nearly 10 million dollar investigation over two years and five months the ntsb publishes its report and determines that the probable cause of the egypt air flight 990 accident is the airplane's departure from normal cruise flight and subsequent impact with the atlantic ocean as a result of the relief first officer's flight control inputs the egyptian civil aviation authority responded angrily and their response read in part it is obvious that the ntsb has not done the type of professional accident investigation expected by the egyptian government the ntsb's former director of aviation safety takes exception to the egyptian view what was unprofessional was the insistence by the egyptians in the face of irrefutable evidence to anyone who knows anything about investigating um airplane accidents and who knows anything about aerodynamics and airplanes was the fact that this airplane was intentionally flown into the ocean no scenario that the egyptians came up with or that we came up with um in which there were some sort of mechanical failure in the elevator control system would either match the flight profile or was a situation in which the airplane was not recoverable like many of his countrymen the loyal nephew cannot believe his uncle gamil was a mass murderer this is a simple plane crash it was put and made like this for for no reason it shows that it's a cover-up greg phillips takes pride in having thoroughly investigated every lead and every scenario when we sign on to be accident investigators we do it with the idea that we're going to keep the next one from happening not to uh not to cover up one that did because of whatever reason may be given to us i've never known that to happen i've never even known it to come close to happening there continue to be differing perspectives on the crash of egypt air flight 990 and unanswered questions remain for broken and damaged families for many of them answers to how and why this plane crashed will forever be a painful mystery you

Channel: Wonder

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Keywords: Wonder, wonder channel, survivial videos, survival stories, i shouldn't be alive, outdoor channel, extreme documentary, mayday air crash investigation, mayday air disaster, air crash investigation, air crash investigation full episodes, air crash documentary, EgyptAir Flight 990, egyptair flight 990, egyptair 990, egyptair 990 air crash investigation, egyptair hijack, egyptair flight 990 voice recording, egyptair flight 990 air crash investigation, egyptair crash

Id: vya9rG_AaGQ

Length: 50min 28sec (3028 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021