The world is in a familiar place after Thursday’s crash of EgyptAir Flight 804 in the Mediterranean Sea: wondering what happened, and whether it’s a sign of a broader danger that must be addressed.
Speculation can turn out to be wildly inaccurate so soon after a crash, but it’s human nature to want to know what went wrong and make sure other planes aren’t threatened. The trouble is that it’s still unclear why the airliner went down.
Judging from how the jet behaved in the few minutes before it disappeared, the likeliest cause seems to be a bomb, like the one that brought down a Russian airliner over the Sinai last October. It’s extremely unusual for a reliable, well-made airplane cruising at 38,000 feet in good weather to suddenly make violent turns, plunge thousands of feet and vanish from radar.
Further, there were reports over the weekend that the jet’s automatic maintenance reporting system sent messages that smoke had been detected at the front of the aircraft, a sign of a fire, an explosion or both.
If evidence eventually confirms terrorism, focus should shift to possible security lapses at airports that the EgyptAir flight visited in its last 24 hours: Paris, Cairo, Tunis and Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.
But though sabotage seems like the likeliest cause, other scenarios can’t be ruled out, including an electrical fire. Battery fires have plagued other aircraft, including incidents that led the FAA to briefly ground the entire fleet of Boeing’s Dreamliners in 2013.
The obvious key is finding the wreckage and the jet’s black boxes, which can be extremely hard to do when the crash site is in the sea. Searchers have found debris on the surface, but floating wreckage can drift far from where the airliner lies on the seabed, in this case 2 miles down.
It took almost two years to find the black boxes from an Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, even though searchers began with a rough idea where the jet was, thanks to a system Air France used to send information from its flights every few minutes. The EgyptAir flight was being tracked by radar but disappeared before it hit the water, likely because its avionics failed due to the fire or because radar can’t track below certain altitudes.
The crash has revived controversial demands for planes to broadcast their positions in real time — something that might have given searchers a way to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared in March 2014 and has never been found. International aviation authorities have talked about requiring airliners to broadcast their position every 15 minutes, but a better idea is to require jetliners to make more frequent, automatic broadcasts of their positions. A broadcast unit with a simple backup battery could send position reports even when a fire or explosion had cut the plane’s electrical power.
Airlines will complain about the cost, but the alternative can be far more expensive. The search for Malaysia Flight 370 has cost more than $133 million — not to mention the emotional toll on families and the nagging uncertainty about what made the jetliner vanish.
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