According to an inquiry, the 2016 accident of EgyptAir flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo, which Egyptian officials initially mistook for a terrorist attack, was caused by a pilot smoking a cigarette.
On May 19, 2016, the plane went missing in the Mediterranean Sea between Crete and the coast of northern Egypt, carrying 66 passengers and crew members, all of whom were killed. The wreckage was discovered after a month of searching.
Egyptian authorities first claimed to have discovered signs of explosives in the bones of the flight’s victims. The prosecutor general of Cairo demanded an urgent investigation into state security, but the results were never made public.
The reason of the disaster has now been attributed to the pilots’ cigarette smoking, according to a private 134-page inquiry document written by French experts and filed to the Paris Court of Appeal.
A maintenance engineer placed the co-oxygen pilot’s mask in “emergency” mode instead of “normal,” according to the report obtained by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
The cigarette ignited the oxygen, causing a spark that ignited the fire. The jet’s monitoring system warned of smoke at the front of the plane shortly before it vanished, according to the study.
The ACARS system, which sends short signals between planes and ground stations, delivered seven dispatches in two seconds, including a warning about a computer system critical to the plane’s flight manoeuvre mechanisms malfunctioning.
According to the investigation, neither the pilot, Mohammed Saied Ali Shokair, nor the co-pilot, Mohammed Ahmed Mamdouh Assem, requested assistance.
Authorities were on high alert at the time of the disaster, following the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan concert theatre in Paris and the Brussels airport.
Egyptian authorities did not divulge their findings or issue a report within one year, as required by international law, due to the terrorism allegations.
The black box of the jet was examined by France’s Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), but intergovernmental agreements preclude the French authorities – who are not officially in charge of the investigation – from disclosing any information.
The country in charge of the investigation must provide a public report within 12 months after the occurrence, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). It must issue a provisional report on each anniversary of the event if it is unable to do so.