CAIRO, 21 January 2004 — Egyptian and French investigators studying the flight data recorders of an Egyptian plane that crashed into the Red Sea said yesterday they had found no sign that terrorists were responsible.
They said a “first look” at the recorders retrieved from the seabed at the weekend bolstered earlier assessments that an accident caused the Jan. 3 crash that killed all 148 people aboard, most of them French tourists.
“Now that we have the two black boxes, we are sure there is no possibility of terrorism because it is very obvious there is no outside intervention of any kind,” the Egyptian leading the investigation, Shaker Qaleda, told reporters.
“What we are looking at is a classic aircraft accident. It could be a technical defect or mismanagement of the crew or a combination of both,” Qelada said.
Qaleda added that explosive experts had also found no traces of explosives when they studied wreckage from the waters off the Egyptian Red Sea resort at Sharm El-Sheikh.
“It is obvious the plane has not exploded in the air,” the Egyptian investigator said, adding the plane must have gone “down in one piece” because investigators found very little debris floating on the water.
Gerard Legauffre, a French investigator speaking at the same press conference, said “we made a first quick reading of the black boxes and the cockpit voice recorder shows there is no outside intervention.”
The disaster “is a combination of technical and operational factors,” according to Legauffre, an investigator from the French Accidents Investigation Bureau (BEA). Both the cockpit voice recorder and another box recording the Boeing 737’s flight movements were retrieved at the weekend by a French submarine robot from depths of more than 1,000 meters beneath the sea.
The Flash Airlines charter plane bound for Paris crashed minutes after take-off from Sharm El-Sheikh, killing 134 French tourists, a Moroccan and the 13 Egyptian crew.
Senior French officials said two weeks ago that it appeared the plane had crashed as a result of a sudden loss of power.
French sources reported yesterday that large chunks of the engines were found close to each other in waters around 1,030 meters deep, and that they would send submarine robots to bring them to the surface.
