Boats Resume Search for Bodies From Plane Crash; Switzerland Says It Banned Airline a Year Ago

Rescuers on Sunday resumed searching for bodies after a charter jet full of French tourists crashed into the Red Sea, killing all 148 people aboard. Switzerland, meanwhile, revealed that it had banned the airline more than a year ago because of safety problems.

Flash Airlines flight FSH604, bound for Paris with a stopover in Cairo, crashed early Saturday, minutes after taking off from the airport at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik. Officials blamed mechanical failure.

Search crews on military and civilian vessels have found only small pieces of wreckage and "very few" body parts from the shark-infested waters near the resort, an official of Egypt's Environment Protection Department said on condition of anonymity.

Egyptian officials said the Flash Airlines jet, an 11-year-old Boeing 737, had checked out fine before the flight. But Swiss aviation authorities said Sunday they had banned Flash from flying into Switzerland for more than a year because of technical worries. "A series of safety shortcomings showed up in a plane of Flash Airlines during a routine security check at Zurich Airport in October 2002," Celestine Perissinotto, spokeswoman for the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation, told The Associated Press.

She declined to go into detail and didn't know what type of plane had problems in Switzerland. Flash Airlines, which has been in business for six years, said in Egypt that the Boeing 737 that crashed was one of two it owned.

The Egyptian government has said the crash was an accident apparently caused by a mechanical problem. It came amid worldwide security alerts for terror threats in the skies.

Search teams also were seeking the "black box" flight data recorders to provide more details about the cause of the crash, Egyptian Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafeeq said.

Tourists in swimsuits and TV crews with satellite dishes watched from the beach Sunday as searchers circled the waters in small boats.

French Deputy Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier told reporters in Sharm el-Sheik, about 300 miles southeast of Cairo near the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula, that the human remains found were so badly mangled that it would be difficult to identify them.

"We were able to see the bags full of body parts, Muselier said, choking back tears after visiting a hospital morgue. "It was terrible to see."

The pilot tried to turn back after detecting problems on takeoff and was making the turn when the plane plunged into the sea, French and Egyptian officials said Saturday.

The environment protection official said rescue workers believed the fuselage of the Boeing 737 was resting in 2,600 feet of water. The depth of the water was hampering search efforts, Shafeeq said.

The search was suspended Saturday night but resumed at daybreak Sunday with four aircraft and 40 boats searching a 4-square-mile expanse of sea.

The governor of South Sinai, Mostafa Afifi, told Egyptian state television that the plane hit the sea so hard that everything shattered. "We can't say that we have found bodies as bodies. We have found 11 to 13 bodies but in pieces," he said.

A French investigation team was expected to arrive later Sunday and French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin declared the nation in mourning. The United States also was sending an accident investigator.

A French Foreign Ministry spokesman said 133 French tourists were on the flight. One Japanese, one Moroccan, and 13 Egyptian crew members also were on the flight, Shafeeq said.

Most of the passengers were on a tour organized by FRAM, one of France's largest travel operators. FRAM said it had 125 people - mostly families or groups of friends - on the flight. Some were children.

Shafeeq said Saturday the plane checked out fine before takeoff. "The first indications suggest a technical fault," he said.

Radar images showed that the plane turned left as normal after takeoff, then suddenly straightened out and turned right before plunging into the sea, Shafeeq said.

The jet arrived at the resort early Saturday from Venice, Italy, dropping off passengers in Sharm el-Sheik, the airline said. New passengers then boarded for the flight to Paris via Cairo. The airplane underwent maintenance checks in Norway and the most recent one showed no problems, officials said.

Perissinotto said the Swiss report had been given to the airline and to Egyptian civil aviation authorities.

The airline has been banned from entering or flying over Switzerland since October 2002, but one of its planes was allowed to make a landing in Geneva last year for exceptional reasons, she added.

That plane was supposed to land in Paris but was diverted to Geneva because of bad weather, she said.

Swiss authorities demanded that the airline explain why it needed to land in Geneva, but "these explanations were also insufficient. The situation had not improved," Perissinotto said.

Saturday's crash was Egypt's biggest aviation disaster since 1999, when an EgyptAir jetliner crashed shortly after leaving New York en route to Cairo, killing all 217 people aboard.

Here's the German version of that story. Details are similar, with some other additions, such as the plane having trouble gaining altitude, for example.

Reports this AM in Germany put the black box in 150 meters of water.

This story has all but disappeared on "Spiegel". It took me a while to find it, buried in the 'other' stories category.

DISASTER AIRLINE FLASH

"A Danger to Air Safety"

After the crash of a charter machine into the Red Sea, the rescue of the bodies continues. In the meantime it has become known: The Egyptian charter Airline flash, who owned the Boeing, has already made a bad impression. German authorities are checking whether landing rights for Flash should be withdrawn.

Zürich/Cairo - Switzerland had already withdrawn fly-over rights for the Egyptian company in October, 2002. "During an inspection we discovered that the airline company signified a danger for aviation safety" said the spokeswoman for the Swiss aviation authority, Celestine Perissinotto, said in Zürich on Sunday. "If a company (fly-over rights) is withdrawn, it means that the problems are serious ", she added.

The Boeing 737 operated by Charter company Flash Airlines crashed on takeoff on Saturday in Egyptian vacation spot Scharm el Scheich with 148 passengers on board - among them 133 vacationers from France. The government in Cairo attributed the accident to technical problems.

The Swiss Aviation Autority had, according to its own records, informed Flash Airlines and the Egyptian Aviation Authorities about the problems. "The responses, however, were not satisfactory", it said further.

After the crash, the Federal Aviation Bureau in Braunschweig examined flying rights for Flash Airlines. "The company has had incursion rights since September, 2003. There have been no negative discoveries, so far", the spokeswoman for the Federal Office, Cornelia Eichhorn, said on Sunday. For safety reasons, however, an examination of the incursion rights has been set up now, said Eichhorn further.

"Like a stone"

Concerning the circumstances surrounding the crash, the television station LCI reported the plane had gained altitude at take off only with difficulty, had lost 1500 meters of altitude within 17 seconds, and dropped into the sea "like a stone". According to information from deputy French Minister of Transport Dominique Boissereau, a technical breakdown had probably caused the accident.

Search at sea: Flight recorder still not located

Divers in the red sea have recovered 13 bodies so far, Arabian TV transmitters reported on the Sunday morning. Relatives of the 133 victims from France were expected at the scene of the crash on Sunday.

Thus far, neither flight recorder nor the main part of the wreckage, in which, most likely, numerous bodies are trapped, could be located. The search has been hindered in it that the wreckage is in depths of up to 1000 meters. The government in Paris is planning to deploy a ship with Sonar equipment, a sub-water robot and diver for the search.

Business is lively on the beach

On the beaches of Scharm el Scheich lively bathing und diving acticity was the rule. Only the Parachute-Gliding behind speedboats on the coast was banned because of the rescue operations. Hotel managers report, after the crash there were no cancellations by worried tourists.

Besides the 133 French und 13 Egyptian crew members, there had been, also, according to details from Cairo, a Morrocan and a Japanese woman on Board. According to the Lebanese newspaper "Al-Nahar", A lebanese-born woman, who has lived in France for 13 years, and her French husband alos died in the crash.

"Spiegel-Online"...."Für die Luftsicherheit eine Gefahr"

Translated by longjack

Quite so. As I recall from passenger lists linked to and/or posted on FR, there wasn't even an obviously Moslem name on the list. So a shoe bomber would have had to conceal their identity. That's one reason why I think it was a baggage bomb. Flights like that would would be jammed with people taking stuff home to the relatives. Lots of big random boxes in the luggage, full of applicances and electronics.

The two main reasons to suspect AA587 was sabotaged are: The eyewitness accounts of explosion/fire on board; the engines coming off as well as the vertical stabilizer. The latter reason is in line with the fact that planes don't, in general, come apart in flight except after control is lost and it goes, literally, sideways, thereby creating the forces that rip off large surfaces. The engines and the tail came off due to aerodynamic forces, not due to the impossible notion the plane was "spinning" fast enough to make them come off.

Unknown group claims ''attack'' on Egyptian charter plane, vows to strike Air France
05-01-2004, 15:45

A man claiming to represent an Islamic group in Yemen said on Monday the Egyptian charter plane that crashed Saturday was brought down in an "attack" by the group's members, in a telephone call to AFP.

The man, who said he was an Egyptian calling from Cairo, said he spoke on behalf of a group dubbed Ansar el-Haq (the Apostles of Truth), which he said carried out an attack that brought down the plane.

Ansar el-Haq is based in Yemen, he said.

A Boeing 737 operated by a Cairo-based charter firm, Flash Airways, plunged into the Red Sea on Saturday shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 148 people aboard, mainly French tourists.

Egypt has ruled out terrorism as a cause of the crash and pointed to an unspecified technical fault. French officials said it appeared to have been a classic accident on take-off.

The caller also warned that his group would launch an attack "soon" against Air France "if France does not go back on its decision to prohibit the Islamic headscarf" in state schools. (Albawaba.com)

http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=267288&lang=e&dir=news

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