Returning from Addis Ababa after leading the Egyptian official delegation to attend the funeral of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Egypt's Prime Minister Hisham Qandil miraculously escaped death in the air. About 20 minutes after it took off from Addis Ababa, Qandil's plane had to make an emergency landing after running into a thunderstorm at 43.000 feet. Captain Alaa Nasr said that the plane plummeted to only 1.000 feet and he almost lost control of it completely. The captain remarked: “The radar did not pick up the thunderstorm; the control room at the poorly-equipped airport in Addis Ababa did not provide any sort of help and everything went haywire. "I was on my own and had to forget about the control room in Ethiopia." After huge efforts made by the pilot and his crew, Qandil's plane made a midnight emergency landing at el-Maza Airport in Heliopolis. Ambulances and fire-fighting vehicles rushed to the plane. Everybody heaved a sigh of relief when the Prime Minister and members of his delegation disembarked, all in one piece. Their faces were pale and haggard. “We escaped death on our return home to Cairo from Addis Ababa," stated one of the PM's delegation. Disaster was averted on this recent occasion, but, on October 31, 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, 60 miles southeast of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts in the US. All 217 on board, including military officers, were killed. Investigations conducted at that time by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that the probable cause of the crash was a series of control inputs made by Flight 990's co-pilot Gamil el-Batouti, who was in the position of relief first officer in command at the time of the crash. When Flight 990's black box was decoded, el-Batouti was heard saying "On God I depend," seconds before disaster struck. The NTSB suspected that el-Batouti had played a deliberate role in the crash, seizing the plane's controls and turning off the auto-pilot after the captain left the cockpit. NTSB added that the co-pilot then put the plane into a dive, continually repeating 'Tawkalat ala Allah' (On God I depend). "The pilot then came back into the cockpit, tried to stop the dive, but could not prevent the plane from crashing into the ocean," alleged the NTSB. Egyptian aviation authorities at that time denied this. Some unsubstantiated stories were also circulated to explain the reasons behind el-Batouti's accidental suicidal dive. Investigators claimed that they learned that el-Batouti was supposedly reprimanded for inappropriate conduct with female guests at the Hotel Pennyslvania, a New York hotel used by EgyptAir crews. El-Batouti, a former Egyptian Air Force officer, was married with five children, the youngest of whom, Aya, was ten years old at the time of the crash. The reprimand included the removal of Gameel el-Batouti's privilege of flying any flight to the United States, he had been told that Flight 990 would be his last. El-Batouti was, tragically, less fortunate than his colleague, who piloted the Prime Minister's plane to safety after it ran into the thunderstorm. Fresh investigations into the Flight 990 tragedy might reveal the fact that the plane also ran into a thunderstorm, and its co-pilot and chief pilot were in a predicament, unable to deal with the situation. El-Batouti surely started saying: “On God I depend," when he discovered that the controls and radar in the cockpit had stopped working and he had to rely on his own intuition to save the plane; but he had no time to manoeuvre the plane to safety.
