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Flash Airlines Flight 604
Flash Airlines Flight 604 was a charter flight from Sharm El Sheikh International Airport in Egypt to Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris, France, with a stop-over at Cairo International Airport, provided by Egyptian private charter company Flash Airlines. On 3 January 2004, the Boeing 737-300 that was operating the route crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff from Sharm El Sheikh International Airport, killing all 135 passengers, most of whom were French tourists, and all thirteen crew members.[1] The findings of the crash investigation were controversial, with accident investigators from the different countries involved unable to agree on the cause of the accident. Flight 604 was the deadliest air disaster in Egypt until it was surpassed almost twelve years later by the bombing of Metrojet Flight 9268.[2][3] It remains the deadliest accident involving a 737 Classic aircraft.[4] History of the flightAircraft The aircraft involved, manufactured in October 1992, was an 11-year-old Boeing 737-3Q8 powered by two CFM International CFM56-3C1 engines. At the time of the accident, it had accumulated around 25,600 flight hours and 18,000 cycles of takeoffs and landings.[5] CrewThe captain of Flight 604 was 53-year-old Khedr Abdullah.[6] He was a highly respected pilot who had accrued almost 7,500 hours of flight time, including 474 hours on the Boeing 737. The first officer was 25-year-old Amr al-Shaafei[7][8] who had fewer than 800 hours of flying experience, with 242 of them on the Boeing 737. 42-year-old Ashraf Abdelhamid, who was training as a first officer and had experience flying corporate jets, sat in the cockpit with the pilot and co-pilot.[7] Though Egyptian, Abdelhamid also held Canadian and U.S. citizenships.[9][10] PassengersMost of the passengers aboard the flight were French tourists from the Paris metropolitan area. A provisional passenger list, dated 5 January 2004, stated that twelve entire French families had boarded the flight.[11] Members of only seventeen families appeared at Charles de Gaulle Airport to meet passengers off the flight; this gave an indication to the airport staff that entire families had died on Flight 604.[12][13]
AccidentThe aircraft departed from Sharm El Sheikh International Airport at 04:42 EET (02:42 UTC) on 3 January 2004. After taking off, it made a left turn to intercept the airport's VOR system, and the autopilot was then engaged. Shortly afterwards, however, Captain Khedr made an unintelligible exclamation and the autopilot abruptly disconnected (this might have been an intentional action by the pilots or it may have happened automatically). At this point the aircraft entered a right bank of 40 degrees. When the bank reached 50 degrees, First Officer al-Shaafei called out "overbank," indicating that the aircraft's bank was becoming dangerous. The bank angle increased rapidly until it reached 111 degrees at which point the aircraft entered a stall. It crashed into the Red Sea at 04:45 EET (02:45 UTC), just three minutes after takeoff, at a speed of 412 knots (763 km/h; 474 mph) at a right bank angle of 24 degrees and at a nose-down angle of 24 degrees. The tail broke off of the plane and rolled forward after the crash into the sea. All 148 people on board perished.[5] InvestigationInitially, it was thought that terrorists might have been involved, as fear of aviation terrorism was high (with several major airlines in previous days cancelling flights on short notice). The British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, was also on holiday in the Sharm El Sheikh area. A group in Yemen said that it destroyed the aircraft as retaliation against a new law in France banning headscarves in schools. Accident investigators dismissed terrorism when they discovered that the wreckage was in a tight debris field, indicating that the aircraft crashed in one piece; a bombed aircraft would have disintegrated and left a large debris field.[7] The wreckage sank to a depth of 1,000 m (3,300 ft), making recovery of the flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) difficult. However two weeks after the accident, both devices were located by a French salvage vessel and recovered by a ROV. The accident investigators examined the recorders while in Cairo. The maintenance records of the aircraft had not been duplicated; they were destroyed in the crash and no backup copies existed.[7] The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MCA) investigated the accident, with assistance from the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)[14] and the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA).[15] The MCA released its final report into the accident on 25 March 2006.[14] The report did not conclude with a probable cause, listing instead four "possible causes."[5]: 1171 The NTSB and the BEA concluded that the pilot suffered spatial disorientation and the copilot was unwilling to challenge his more experienced superior. Furthermore, according to the NTSB and BEA, both officers were insufficiently trained. The NTSB stated that the cockpit voice recorder showed that 24 seconds passed after the airliner banked before the pilot began corrective maneuvers. Egyptian authorities disagreed with this assessment, instead blaming mechanical issues.[16] Shaker Kelada, the lead Egyptian investigator, said that if Hamid, who had more experience than the copilot, detected any problems with the flight, he would have raised objections.[7] Some media reports suggest that the plane crashed due to technical problems, possibly a result of the airline's apparently questionable safety record. This attitude was shown in a press briefing given by the BEA chief who was berated by the first officer's mother during a press conference, and demanded that the crew be absolved of fault prior to the completion of the investigation. Two months after the crash, Flash Airlines declared bankruptcy.[16] According to an excerpt from page five of the U.S.'s comments on the final report of this accident:
Problems associated with the complexity of autopilot systems were documented in the June 2008 issue of Aero Safety World.[18] Before the completion of the investigation, Avionics writer David Evans suggested that differences in artificial horizon instrumentation between the MiG-21 (with which the captain had experience) and the Boeing 737 may have contributed to the crash.[19] In popular cultureThe Discovery Channel Canada / National Geographic TV series Mayday (also called Air Crash Investigation or Air Emergency) depicted the accident in a 2007 episode titled "Vertigo".[20] See also
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