God,” and the autopilot disengaged. Four seconds later, another “I rely on God,” and two things happened: the throttles moved from fast to minimum idle and the massive rear elevators dropped, raising the tail and pointing the nose down. The copilot apparently choked the power and pushed the control yoke forward. The airplane dived steeply, and six times in quick succession, the copilot said calmly, “I rely on God.” As the nose continued to pitch downward, the inside of the plane changed from no gravity to negative gravity, with objects hitting the ceiling.
Somehow, sixteen seconds into the dive, the pilot managed to return and yelled, “What’s happening? What’s happening?” He got no answer other than “I rely on God.” Then the two evidently fought for control of the airplane. The pilot tried to move the nose up and the copilot held it down, so that the elevators split, one down, one up, a most unusual configuration. (That they split is a design feature allowing either pilot to overcome a mechanical jam and fly the airplane with only one elevator.) The plane descended at a maximum rate of 630 feet per second and at a downward angle of almost 40 degrees. Somewhere along the line, the copilot turns off the engines while the pilot shouts incredulously. The plane hits about 550 miles per hour at 16,000 feet, when the pilot’s efforts seem to have reversed the dive. The plane then soars steeply back up to 24,000 feet, loses its left engine, and dives at high speed into the ocean. This must have been the most horrifying roller-coaster ride of a lifetime, lasting as it did for two minutes.
The NTSB did a voice-stress analysis that showed a sharp contrast between the copilot and the pilot as they fought for control of the airplane. The pilot’s voice rose steadily in pitch and intensity, as one would expect from a person under growing stress and panic. But the copilot’s never changed. Through a total of twelve utterances of “I rely on God,” his voice never betrayed any stress or fear. He intended what he did and he was calm in his intention.
The only part of this story we do not know is why the copilot brought the plane down. Was it the presence of those thirty-four generals aboard? He was not known to be politically active. Was it the fact that he had been warned only a few days before by a very senior pilot (himself riding as a passenger on this flight) to grow up before he caused himself serious problems? He indeed had a reputation for inappropriate behavior at the hotel in New York where the airline personnel stayed: following women (uninvited) toward their rooms, for example, and similar behavior, nothing dangerous, perhaps more on the pathetic side. He was carrying items in the plane for use back in Egypt, a part for his car and so on, so perhaps the decision was made shortly before he enacted it. If he was acting vindictively toward EgyptAir, the presence of all those generals may have made the suicide more dramatic and costly. We will never know, because part of Egyptian denial was either never to investigate the copilot’s possible motives or to hide whatever they found out. If NTSB investigations in the United States were typically run this way, we would have no objective data on the causes of airplane crashes. This is a case of self-deception intruding at yet a higher level—the international one—to impede the truth at an international cost. Surely we all benefit from reducing civilian crashes.
Of course, Egypt is far from alone. For example, in the United States hardly anyone is conscious of—much less concerned by—the fact that the US economic embargo has prevented Iran from directly acquiring replacement parts for its aging airplanes. The country imposing the embargo is the same one that sold the planes, so here is a country acting in gross violation of international public safety for purely petty reasons when it alone has a legal obligation (original contracts signed) to provide replacement parts. This is a form of economic warfare, perhaps with the meta-message, “Go screw yourself and may your airplanes crash, too.”
SAVED BY LACK OF SELF-DECEPTION?
Perhaps we can end on a more positive note with the reverse of what we have described so far: the celebrated safe landing of a plane in the Hudson River shortly after takeoff from La Guardia Airport in New York on January 17, 2009, saving all 155 lives.