EgyptAir crashes again

FOURTEEN people died, including seven Egyptians, when an EgyptAir Boeing 735- 500 with 62 passengers and eight crew members crashed on Tuesday as it was attempting to land at Tunis airport, reports Amira Ibrahim. The pilot, Ashraf Abdel-Aal, survived the crash but later succumbed to his injuries. The seven other dead passengers are Tunisians and a Jordanian.
The 48 injured passengers include 20 Egyptians, 14 Tunisians, three Pakistanis, three Algerians, two Jordanians, a Libyan, a Palestinian, an Indian, a Saudi, a Briton and a Belgian.
Reports indicate that the pilot was trying to make an emergency landing amid heavy rain and foggy conditions when the aircraft slammed into the Sidi Nahli hill just six kilometres from the Tunis-Carthage airport.
The plane broke in half, throwing bodies and luggage onto the shrub-covered rocks. The front of the plane survived the impact intact but the tail was smashed to smithereens.
Tunis airport officials said the plane's landing gear failed to open during the approach into Tunis airport. "When [the pilot] found it difficult to handle the landing gear, he made a half-circle before [the plane] was lost from the airport radar screens," a Tunis airport official said. Egyptian officials refused to rush to a judgement. However, the Civil Aviation Ministry sent a technical committee, which arrived yesterday to investigate the cause of the crash. The US government also said it was sending a team of specialists to help investigate the crash.
Ahmed Abdel-Halim El-Shaer, one of the survivors, spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly from Tunisia. "There was no indication that something wrong was happening until we heard the [screeching] sound of the landing gear. However, the pilot assured us there was nothing to fear. Then we heard a loud explosion and we were shaken off our seats. I finally looked around, and saw the plane split into two parts," El-Shaer recounted.
According to El-Shaer, the casualties mostly included passengers in the rear section of the airplane. He and others emerged from the wreckage, some wailing hysterically while others checked for survivors.
El-Shaer indicated that rescue workers took 40 minutes to reach the disaster site "because of the mountainous crash site and wet and foggy weather."
At Cairo Airport yesterday, little information on the crash was made available to passengers' families, leaving them to shuffle helplessly from one office to the other in their search for news of their loved ones.
The last fatal EgyptAir crash was in October 1999 when a Boeing 767 crashed off the coast of the United States, killing all 217 people on board. While US investigators said that the co-pilot intentionally crashed the plane into the ocean, Egyptian officials vehemently rejected the claim and requested, last month, additional investigations into the crash by the National Transportation and Safety Board.
Tuesday's crash occurred on the same day a China Northern airliner with 103 passengers and nine crew members plunged into the sea near the northeastern city of Dailan.
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