EgyptAir 804 explanations?

by philg

Friends keep asking me to explain the loss of EgyptAir 804, but of course I am just as confused as everyone else.

The only thing that I learned from my airliner-flying days (sample) that might be relevant is that most of the important stuff in an airliner is under the floor. I still wonder “Why doesn’t a passenger spilling a Diet Coke take out half of the radios?”

The flight deck door is now armored but the floorboards under the bathroom aren’t. So in theory a malicious passenger could perhaps open a hole in the bathroom floor and put an incendiary device into the avionics bay. This would explain the “lavatory smoke” message that was received and also result in a catastrophic problems for a fly-by-wire Airbus A320. Perhaps a malicious passenger could shortcut the process by pouring explosive/flammable stuff down the drain and lighting it on fire? I don’t know enough about the plumbing in an A320 to make an educated guess about that. (I do know that the Ryanair proposal to charge passengers to use the bathroom made a lot of sense; it is hard to think of anything more costly than putting tanks of liquid into the pressure vessel of an aircraft.)

It is sad that 66 people died to leave us this puzzle, but the puzzle yet remains.

11 thoughts on “EgyptAir 804 explanations?”

  1. How easily would mercury (probably easy to smuggle inside a container that looks like a travel shampoo bottle) degrade the aluminum that was exposed?

  2. having lived in Egypt for 3.5 yrs, when first reports indicated that the plane swerved left and then made a 360 degree turn to the right, it immediately brought to mind several occasions when we were flying to the Sinai from Cairo for a vacation on the Red Sea. The Egypt Air pilot made a sudden change of direction as apparently air traffic control told him in fact we weren’t stopping in Hurghada en route to Sharm el Sheikh (this happened at least twice). Also, our then kindergarten son was in class with the son of an American aircraft engineer, overseeing training and improved maintenance for Egypt Air. He said he observed rags being used to keep parts in place. Who thinks thinks this mystery will be solved definitively?

  3. When the wreckage is recovered from the 10,000ft deep Mediterranean, it might still take weeks of conjecture to come up with a plausible explanation to due primitive data recording. So why not replace cockpit voice recorders with 4K GoPros sprinkled throughout the cabin and cockpit? And maybe on the outside of the aircraft too? Hi-def video would immediately give an accurate picture of what happened in the case of an accident, and stuffing a few terabyte SSDs into the black boxes + getting it certified couldn’t cost more that much?

  4. I’m actually interested in the airplane lavatory comments.

    After many years of flying, I’ve developed a routine where I will use the airport restroom minutes before boarding the plane. I avoid using the lavatories on the aircraft. I will wait a few hours until the aircraft lands, and then use the airport restroom on debarking, though the few minutes spent on this often means retrieving my bags from some office and not the baggage carousel. The reason is that I prefer window seats and dislike climbing over people to get to the aisle and back, and there is usually a line to the lavatory, and impatient people outside once you enter. Actually I’ve taken to avoiding public single-stall lavatories altogether because there is almost always a line (btw I’m a guy) and the moment you shut the door there is always someone pounding on the door to get in, particularly in more upscale places.

    So on flights at least of less than three hours in duration, being charged to use the restroom wouldn’t really hurt me. But I still think its a bad idea. Sometimes, you just have to go. Also, the optics are just bad as airline passengers perceive that they are nickled and dimed in one scam after another over everything. People put up with this stuff now but eventually it will boil over with people doing what they can to avoid air travel entirely. And as they shove more people into these craft, more people will adopt my restroom going strategy anyway.

    If its a problem, a better option is to lock the lavatories and give the flight crews the keys. A passenger has to ask permission of the flight crew to use. Even if in practice they give permission all the time, fewer people will use the lavatories. It will kill the mile high club thing, but it pretty much takes care of any problem with passengers abusing the facilities.

  7. John Galt: it’s worth understanding that as impressive as GoPro cameras are, flight data recorders are tested to limits well beyond what consumer-grade electronics can withstand. Nothing about this screams “let’s get some ordinary off-the-shelf-hardware and toss it in a black box”.

    https://www.aea.net/AvionicsNews/ANArchives/TechSpeakMar10.pdf

    Some highlights:
    “- Crash Impact: The CSMU (crash-survivable memory unit) is shot down an air cannon to create an impact of 3,400 g. At 3,400 g, the CSMU hits an aluminium honeycomb target at a force 3,400 times its weight. This impact force is equal to or in excess of what a recorder could experience during a crash.
    – Pin Drop: To test the unit’s penetration resistance, a 500 lbs (227 kg) weight
    with a 0.25-inch steel pin protruding from the bottom is dropped onto the CSMU from a height of 10 feet (3 m). This pin, with 500 lbs behind it, hits the CSMU cylinder’s most vulnerable axis.
    – Static Crush: For 5 minutes, 5,000 psi of crush force is applied to each of the
    unit’s six major axis points.
    – Fire Test: The unit is placed into a propane-sourced fireball. The unit sits
    inside the fire at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees C) for one hour. The FAA requires all solid-state recorders to be able to survive at least one hour at this temperature.
    – Deep-Sea Submersion: The CSMU is placed into a pressured tank of saltwater
    for 24 hours.
    – Saltwater Submersion: The CSMU must survive in a saltwater tank for 30
    days.
    – Fluid Immersion: Various CSMU components are placed into a variety of
    aviation fluids, including jet fuel, lubricants and fire-extinguisher chemicals.”

  8. re: Ed’s last suggestion (flight attendants holding keys to restrooms) — not only would this hark back to kindergarten, where my kids had to get a pass from their teacher to exit the classroom and use the restroom, but it would be viewed as discriminatory against women. I am a daughterless mom, and also someone who finds the air on airplanes very dry, so therefore drink more fluids than normal. I use the restroom as much as three times as often as my husband or teenagers. So I wouldn’t like your proposed policy except on flights less than 2 hours. For those of you who find it odd that both captain & co-pilot were named “Mohamed,” something like 80% of the Egyptian men we encountered in 3.5 yrs in Cairo had that moniker of the prophet Mohammed.

  9. Phil, please don’t give future terrorists any helpful hints. For the most part, they are nowhere as smart as you are, nor are they as familiar with the details of aircraft construction. Left to their own devices (no pun intended) they would have a harder time figuring out, for example, what the best place is to place an explosive. There is ample good reason not to provide them with useful pointers.

  10. Phil already explained that he’s as confused here as everybody else, so, please, let us not expand that confusion by piling “logickal” fantasy speculations onto that tragedy, as were it our duty to leave no airborne toilet lid upturned. Even were we competent to opine on that, so far collectively we know much too little to draw any plausible conclusions for EgyptAir 804’s demise. We all live in the 24hr global news circle, with all the talking heads everywhere parroting one another, so let us not worry about missing OFFICIAL EXPLANATIONS when they arrive.

    That said, given the not-too-favourable impression of the Egyptian prestige-heavy EgyptAir 990 (NYC to Cairo 1999) air suicide-murder investigation, how will we ever know if we are being told the truth? (Egypt initially denied the possibility of a terrorist bomb onboard the Russian jet disaster in the Sinaï, too).

    BTW. I followed the #MH370 Twitter- and some other news feeds for a while. There was no end to speculations about its fate. A few months later, with the first round of futile seabed search completed, I concluded “in the empty Indian Ocean, one can search forever,” and quit following the topic. I hear that it only took the Australians and the Chinese 18 more months to reach the same conclusion, as they apparently are winding down the active search operations by the end of May, put on hold until some major investigation-worthy clues wash up.

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