CAIRO, 5 March 2004 — The pilot of the Egyptian plane which crashed into the Red Sea in January, killing 148 people, realized something was wrong while the plane was turning after take-off, an Egyptian civil aviation official said yesterday.
The pilot commented on an anomaly shortly after the autopilot was briefly engaged for about four seconds, investigator Shaker Qilada told a news conference.
But the fact that the flight crew of the Boeing 737 used the autopilot system and then disengaged it is not unusual and may have nothing to do with the accident, said Qilada.
The plane plunged into the sea off the diving resort of Sharm El-Sheikh on Jan. 3, minutes after take-off for Cairo and Paris. All the people aboard, including 134 French tourists, were killed and few remains have been recovered.
Egyptian authorities, in conjunction with Boeing and the French, have been analyzing the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder to find out what went wrong.
“After the autopilot was disengaged, we got a comment from the pilot that he saw something that is not normal. Few seconds later they also announced that the aircraft was not reacting in the way he expected,” Qilada said.
“Then the aircraft was going to the right turn and that is contrary to what should happen... There is an effort to recover but it’s too late. By the time the aircraft was coming near to a normal condition it was actually down in the water,” he said.
The official said the pilot might have done something wrong and was not aware of it, or possibly the instruments were misleading him or perhaps the plane did not perform as expected.
He said there were no signs of any malfunction in the plane’s systems and that it could take years to reach final conclusions.
