A Prayer Before Dying

By Johanna McGeary

The cockpit door opens, then closes. Silence. After four or five minutes, a calm voice utters three words in Arabic. "Tawakalt ala Allah": "I put my faith in God," or "I entrust myself to God."

It is 1:49 a.m. and 46 sec. on Oct. 31. EgyptAir Flight 990 is cruising uneventfully at 33,000 ft. on its normal heading from New York City northeast across the Atlantic toward Cairo. At that moment, two distinct clicks of a button on the control yoke disconnect the autopilot guiding the plane. Eight seconds later, the control yoke is pushed forward, tipping the tail up, pitching the nose down, and the aircraft tilts into a precipitous but controlled dive. Fourteen seconds later, the aircraft reaches 90% of the speed of sound and zero gravity--weightlessness--as it plummets through the night sky.

The cockpit door opens again. The master alarms start to whoop. A voice demands, "What's going on?" or "What's happening?" Then the same voice urges, "Pull with me! Pull with me!" Twenty-seven seconds into the dive, the horizontal elevators on the tail that normally operate in tandem to stabilize the aircraft wrench in opposite directions: the left side pulls to make the plane climb, the right one pushes to keep it in a dive. Gravity and the two powerful Pratt & Whitney engines on the Boeing 767 continue to force the plane down. A second later, a small shield is flicked up over the twin-engine control levers on the central console, and both engines switch off. Four seconds after that, the plane's speed brakes, panels deployed atop the wings rise into the airstream, disrupting the lift in an effort to slow down the descent. Suddenly, the plane begins to climb.

After an additional 11 sec., the flight-data recorder and cockpit voice recorder stop working; the altitude-reporting transponder quits. Land radar tracks the plane as it climbs 8,000 ft. with a force of gravity 2 1/2 times normal. Then the aircraft stalls, lurches downward, breaks apart and leaves nothing on the radar screen but a cascade of neon debris falling into the sea.

Those bare clicks, murmurs and whines recorded by the plane's two black boxes, then synchronized with ground-control radar tracks, are all the "facts" investigators have so far to construct a picture of what happened to Flight 990. But do they add up to the terrible possibility that one of the pilots deliberately sent the plane into its death dive, committing an unspeakable act of self-destruction and mass murder?

Early last week National Transportation Safety Board investigators took that theory seriously enough to consider handing the crash inquiry over to the FBI. But as soon as they heard the shocking suicide hypothesis, Egyptian officials, the Egyptian populace and most of the Arab world cried, "Wait!" and "No way!"

Outraged at what they considered a national and religious insult, Egyptians insisted that American investigators suspend judgment and allow Cairo's experts to review the data thoroughly before launching an FBI criminal probe. Washington agreed, setting an international team to the exhaustive task of decoding the recordings bit by bit, word by word, sound by sound, before any further decisions are made.

The passions inflamed as the investigation by the two nations to uncover the cause of Flight 990's catastrophic end already threatened to turn the tragic air crash into a damaging collision between the U.S. and its best Arab ally in the Middle East. All crash investigations are extremely difficult, especially when most of the material evidence lies beneath 270 ft. of restless ocean. But this case has run smack into taut Middle East sensitivities. Egyptians and Muslims everywhere deeply resent the apparent assumption that any Islamic prayer automatically betokens an act of terror. So far, they charge, there is no other evidence to buttress a suicide theory.

Although the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak ceded responsibility for the case to the U.S., it could refuse to give the FBI free rein to investigate in Egypt. As Administration diplomats worked overtime to calm tempers and encourage cooperation, NTSB officials retreated. By Friday, chairman James Hall was blaming unauthorized news leaks for "flat wrong" speculation that "caused pain" to victims' families and had "done a disservice" to a long-standing international friendship. But despite the diplomatic delicacy, Hall, the Justice Department and FBI officials remain determined to pursue, on their own if need be, the hypothesis that someone deliberately plunged the plane into the sea. "It is not a question of whether we are in it or not in it," says the head of the FBI investigation, Lewis Schiliro. "We are in it."

WHAT THE U.S. SAYS

NTSB investigators have detected no evidence of a mechanical malfunction or a weather-related cause for the crash. If there was some mysterious emergency, the response from the cockpit is still baffling. According to the voice recording, a relief pilot identified as Gamil el-Batouti, who normally formed part of the "cruise crew" that spells the pilot and co-pilot during the long, dull hours of an ocean crossing, asked to begin his shift early, barely half an hour into the flight. The captain, 57-year-old veteran pilot Ahmed el-Habashi, agreed to let the highly experienced el-Batouti, 59, replace co-pilot Adel Anwar, 36, in the right-hand seat. The door heard to open indicated el-Habashi had gone out, leaving el-Batouti alone at the controls. The reference to God suggested to some listeners a sort of farewell, though officials now deny early reports that el-Batouti uttered the even more suspicious remark, "I have made my decision now."

Investigators say the strongest indication of a deliberate act lies in what the airplane did. No alarms signaling equipment breakdown or other emergency went off before the autopilot was disconnected. The steep descent was steady and controlled. The captain would not pull his control yoke up while the co-pilot pushed down. There was no radio mayday and evidently no attempt to signal a hijacking. The plane's final climb may be explained by traditional aerodynamics or by a pilot's desperate effort to regain altitude.

THE WORD FROM EGYPT

Egyptian officials and el-Batouti's family scoff that the NTSB fashioned a chain of events before there was sufficient evidence to rule out mechanical failure. They rail against the flood of premature news leaks and unsubstantiated, sensational headlines. They vehemently deny the notion that a regularly vetted pilot with 35 years' flying experience would suddenly commit mass murder. At least three pilots and some of the 33 air force officers were in the first-class cabin, but no one tried to overpower el-Batouti in the cockpit.

Egyptians are particularly incensed that just three words, in circumstances difficult to interpret, could point to suicide. The words may have been totally misunderstood. El-Batouti was just as likely to be expressing concern at some emergency when he spoke. The phrase was no solemn invocation of death but an everyday expression among Egyptians, murmured at the start of many a mundane task. Suicide defies the holiest precepts of Islam, and for Egyptians it brings unthinkable shame to family and nation. "You can't jump to conclusions from someone quoting the Koran and say this was more than an accident," declared Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.

It has been equally tough to find evidence to support a motive for el-Batouti's suicide, personal or political. His family was devastated. "I had accepted his death as a martyr," said his wife Omayma. "Now they have murdered him." Every one of el-Batouti's colleagues, friends and relatives depicts him as a loving family man, a believer but not a fanatic, respected and well off, content with his imminent retirement, a man who had never displayed the least symptom of psychiatric disorder. "He's a guy who wouldn't hurt a fly," says Los Angeles resident Helal el-Sherif, a friend of el-Batouti's, echoing other friends and family. "He certainly wouldn't take 216 passengers to their deaths." Over dinner at the Sherifs two nights before his final flight, Batouti had discussed the crash that took the life of golfer Payne Stewart. "He was shaking his head at how unbelievable it was," says Juliet el-Sherif.

Amid all the angry disbelief, Egyptian officials had good reason to downplay the suicide theory. It invites speculation that fundamentalist terror groups may have penetrated the state airline. If FBI agents were to conduct interviews on Egyptian soil, it could arouse anti-American nationalists. The idea that a crazed pilot deliberately crashed an EgyptAir plane could wound the country's important tourist industry just as it is recovering from a terrorist massacre that killed 62 two years ago.

Even without news leaks, wild conspiracy theories flourished in Cairo. Many Egyptians are certain Washington is engaged in a vast cover-up to protect itself and libel their nation. More likely, they say, an American missile mistakenly blew up the plane or maybe there were lethal laser emissions--and the pilot was roller-coastering to dodge them. Or an insane hijacker masterminded the crash to damage Egypt's reputation. Or it was a Mossad plot to kill the 33 military officers aboard.

Clearly no one should be rushing to judgment. Mistrustful Egyptians cannot accept the tragedy of pilot suicide without convincing evidence. The U.S. has a long investigation to finish before it can prove any hypothesis is valid. It took investigators 16 months to conclude effectively that an exploded fuel tank, not a missile, brought down TWA 800. The truth about EgyptAir 990 still lies hidden in the deep.

--Reported by Scott MacLeod and Amany Radwan/Cairo, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles

With reporting by Scott MacLeod and Amany Radwan/Cairo, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles