Original subtitles

A Boeing 767 cruises high above the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Egypt.

Two-hundred-and-seventeen people are onboard.

Just half an hour after takeoff, disaster strikes.

The pilot and co-pilot struggle desperately for control of their aircraft.

The lives of all onboard will depend on these two pilots

and what they do about this dive towards the ocean.

- 3,000? - We're not getting any oxygen!

- We have the terrain alarm. - Aero Peru 3...

We are in an emergency.

The John F. Kennedy International Airport outside New York City

is one of the busiest airports in the world.

In 1999, nearly 32-million passengers fly in and out.

More than 340,000 flights take off and land.

EgyptAir Flight 990 is destined

to be one of the most controversial ever to leave this airport.

- Whoa! - The fate of this flight

challenges the strength of an international friendship between two allies,

and uncovers a hidden mechanical flaw

in one of the world's most popular airliners.

The FBI will become involved.

We reviewed surveillance tapes

to indicate whether or not anything unusual was loaded on that the plane.

Investigators in two countries develop two different theories.

Was this a tragic accident, or a terrible crime?

Just after 1 a.m. on October 31, 1999,

the 217 people onboard EgyptAir Flight 990 are waiting for takeoff.

The flight's command captain is Captain Ahmed el-Habashi.

He has been with EgyptAir for 36 years.

Yes.

The Command First Officer is 36-year-old Adel Anwar.

He switched duty with another co-pilot so he could return home in time for his wedding.

- Soon be a married man. - Congratulations, Adel. - Thank you very much.

The airline's Chief Pilot for the Boeing 767,

Captain Hatem Rushdy, joins them in the cockpit.

At 1:20 in the morning,

First Officer Adel Anwar is going through his takeoff clearance

with Air Traffic Control.

...fly the Gateway climb, climbing to 5,000.

Following Gateway, clear for takeoff, runway 22 right.

EgyptAir 990 heavy.

- Cabin crew advised? - In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.

Cabin crew takeoff position.

After an everyday blessing, the co-pilot assists the takeoff.

For safety, both pilots push the throttles.

On a flight of 10 hours, it's standard practice at EgyptAir

to provide a relief crew to share the flying duties.

The command crew takes off and lands,

the relief crew flies the middle portion.

Tonight Captain Raouf Noureldin and First Officer Gamil el-Batouty

are the relief crew.

They will take over after the first three or four hours

and fly the plane until shortly before Cairo.

V1. Rotate.

Positive rate of climb both sides. One thousand.

EgyptAir 990, heavy contact, departure now, 125.7.

1257. Bye.

A large number of passengers are senior citizens from the United States

looking forward to touring the wonders of ancient Egypt.

My dad and Jinny were married in 1998,

on October 23,

and to celebrate their first anniversary,

they decided to take a trip to Egypt.

Anita Child's parents are retired and on their way to Egypt, as well.

They always had a great time on these tours.

They travelled frequently,

and so it was a... pleasure trip.

They were looking forward to seeing the Holy Land especially.

Maureen Sacratini and her brother John Simermeyer enjoyed the fact

that their parents loved to travel.

They had been particularly fond of a program known as Elderhostel,

and this particular vacation trip, uh,

to visit the pyramids and the other, uh,

uh, historical, uh, sites in Egypt was an Elderhostel trip.

There are 14 of EgyptAir's experienced crew operating the flight.

There are also 33 Egyptian military officers and pilots onboard,

returning after training with the American Armed Forces.

Gamil el-Batouty used to be an Egyptian Air Force flight instructor.

He's now one of the oldest first officers at EgyptAir.

He's so much older than the other co-pilots that, out of respect,

they call him "Captain."

But some at EgyptAir think that "Captain" el-Batouty has been coasting too long

on the favours of old friends.

Just over 20 minutes after takeoff,

el-Batouty is about to leave his seat.

Former National Transportation Safety Board investigator Greg Phillips

became an expert on the events of this flight.

The relief first officer who would've been expected to come to the cockpit

somewhere during the later part of the flight,

uh, halfway or wherever he was comfortable,

whatever the normal change would've been,

came into the cockpit about 20 minutes after takeoff.

Hello, Jimmy. How are you?

How are you, sir? What's new?

- I, uh, I slept, I swear. - Just wait.

Let me tell you something. I'm not going to sleep at all.

I might come sit for two hours and--

But I-I-I... I slept. I slept.

You mean you're not going to get up?

You will get up. Go and take some rest and come back.

You should've told me this. You should've told me this, Captain Gamil.

You should've said, "Adel--

- Did I even see you? - "I will work first." Just leave me a message.

The younger first officer seems surprised that el-Batouty

wants to replace him so early in the flight.

...and I'm not sleepy, so you take your time sleeping and when you wake up,

whenever you wake up, come back, Captain, okay?

- I'll come either way. - Captain.

- Come work the last few hours and that's all? - It's not like that.

That's not the point. Look.

If you want to sit here, there's no problem.

I'll come back to you. I'll go and get something to eat and come back, alright?

Fine, fine. Look here. Why don't you go...

Why don't they bring your dinner to you here, and then I'll go sleep, okay?

- That's good. - Okay, with your permission, Captain.

And with that, el-Batouty leaves to get his meal.

Do you see how he does whatever he pleases?

Do you know why that is?

Captain el-Habashi senses his first officer's resentment

and tries to smooth over the situation.

- Are you a youngster? - Anwar wonders if el-Batouty wants to take over,

because he may not want to work with Relief Captain Noureldin.

Doesn't he want to work with Raouf, or what?

It's possible, it's possible. God knows.

Look, you shouldn't get upset, right?

By the prophet, he's just talking nonsense.

That's it.

- Everything's under control. - Okay, chief. - Thanks, Adel.

First Officer Anwar concedes and is ready to hand over to el-Batouty.

Normally, this is the most relaxed,

easy part of a long flight for pilots and passengers alike.

The highly automated aircraft systems

will take care of the flying for several hours.

It's very unusual for an airplane flying over the Atlantic at nighttime

to encounter any kind of difficulties.

We normally expect accidents to happen in approach or landing or near airports,

and very seldom do we get anything out over the ocean in the middle of the night.

- Excuse me, Jimmy, while I take a quick trip to the toilet. - Go ahead, please

Before it gets crowded, while they're still eating. I'll be back to you.

Before the captain returns,

disaster will strike EgyptAir Flight 990.

The fate of everyone onboard will be in the hands of the co-pilot,

the man who shouldn't be here in the first place.

On a Boeing 767 bound for Cairo,

EgyptAir's Flight 990 appears to be cruising smoothly over the Atlantic.

The relief first officer, Gamil el-Batouty, is alone in the cockpit,

while the captain has gone to the washroom.

But then the plane dips, plunging down.

Whoa!

The nose pitches down, creating zero-G, weightlessness, throughout the aircraft.

This airplane basically started at one-G,

which is what we'd expect for a level cruise flight.

As you push the nose down,

as if you would be cresting the top of a hill in a car at a high speed, it drops away,

you'd feel the airplane fall away from you,

and you would start to feel a little light in the seat;

and as the dive progressed, you would feel a bit lighter yet.

I rely on God.

Whatever the first officer is intending,

he says nothing except this phrase again and again.

Adel!

Captain el-Habashi fights the disorientation of zero gravity,

desperately trying to return to the cockpit.

An American journalist living in France studied this flight extensively.

Sixteen seconds after the dive began,

when the airplane had gone into zero-G and into negative-G,

and was at an extreme angle,

the captain somehow made his way back into the cockpit.

How he did that, physically, I will never know.

Warning signals indicate the dive is exceeding the maximum speed allowed

for the plane, taking them to 99% of the speed of sound.

This far past the plane's design limits,

the stresses on the airframe are pulling it apart.

- What's happening?! - I rely on God. I rely on God.

Captain el-Habashi pulls back hard on his control column.

Then he tries to use the engines to power their way out of the dive

by pushing forward on the throttles,

but he gets nothing.

- What? You shut off the engines?! - I rely on God.

Desperate, the captain deploys the speed brakes,

panels standing up from the wings, in an effort to slow the dive.

The dive is slowing, back from the brink of the sound barrier.

The dive goes on, but the nose is coming up.

In just seconds, they go from zero-G to double the force of gravity.

Captain el-Habashi struggles to level the plane

and pulls back hard on the control column.

The 767's dive begins to slow.

- Pull with me! - I rely on God.

You shut off the engine! Pull...!

In seconds the engines stop and the power goes off,

plunging the aircraft into darkness.

Here the cockpit voice recorder and the flight-data recorder stop.

No one knows what happened in the plane during the next two minutes.

- Pull! - But radar tracks its path.

The plane is climbing again...

...up from about 5,000 metres to over 7,500 metres,

as the aircraft structure is weakened by the stresses of abnormal speeds and manoeuvres.

- Pull! - Then the aircraft falls into another terrifying dive.

Stressed beyond endurance, the left engine is ripped from the plane.

EgyptAir 990, New York Center.

EgyptAir 990, if you copy... At 1:52 a.m.,

Flight 990 disappears from radar screens,

crashing into the surface of the Atlantic Ocean,

some 100 kilometres off the American coast.

Coast Guard Search and Rescue get a call at 2:15 a.m.

A plane has disappeared, and Coast Guard vessels are called to the scene.

The U.S. Merchant Marine training vessel, Kings Pointer, is first to arrive.

Just as the day was dawning,

we noticed oil in the water, and that was the first indication,

so we turned the ship around back into the oil,

and as soon as we turned around, we started seeing debris rise up to the surface.

In Heliopolis, a Cairo suburb,

Captain el-Habashi's daughter can only guess what her father went through.

Can you imagine if you have a beloved one,

a father, a daughter, or a brother...

...facing all the horrors...

...of finding himself falling

from 36,000 feets, suddenly,

trying to, uh...

...save his life, his colleagues' lives,

the people, the passengers?

In a home in Maryland, a sleepy Sunday morning takes a tragic turn.

I had woken up for some reason at 5:30 in the morning,

and we were flipping on the TV to check the weather.

And we were deciding what Mass we're gonna be going to. It was Sunday. Um...

And, immediately, on CNN,

they had flight 990 missing, and I... was in total shock.

I ran down to my refrigerator, where I had my parents' itinerary,

and I ripped it off and just...

started sobbing uncontrollably, I was screaming, I didn't know what to do.

We located a significant debris field,

and we have concentrated our search efforts since then

on about a 36 square mile of area,

about 50 miles south of Nantucket.

At the end of October, the waters of the North Atlantic are so cold

that normal life expectancy is about five to six hours.

In Cairo, Relief Captain Raouf Noureldin's daughter,

Mai, clung to hope for her father.

I was talking to myself, trying to convince myself that my father was not on this plane,

and if, uh, he's on this plane,

he will be safe, 'cause, uh,

my father was, um... an Air Force pilot.

He had a very good experience.

And, uh, I thought maybe if the plane crashed,

he would be able to, you know, to be... to be in a safe place,

and to swim and to go to any, uh... land.

At the crash site, all that's left is pieces.

Within hours, authorities know there's little hope for survivors.

We believe at this point that it is in...

everyone's best interests

to no longer expect that we will find survivors in this case.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak reaches out to a stricken nation.

This is the worst air crash in Egypt's history.

Really, I was shocked. It's a big tragedy for us.

And I give my condolences, all the passengers, to the families,

to the families of the crews who have been lost in this tragedy.

And I've contact with President Clinton and other agencies,

and he's giving good support for, uh...

trying to find, investigate, see, what was the reason.

The American President would answer his ally with a commitment.

I spoke earlier with President Mubarak of Egypt today

to express my condolences

and assure him that we would be working together closely until this matter is resolved.

We do not know what caused this tragedy.

In northern Indiana,

music historian Jim Brokaw learned what happened to his father and stepmother.

One of the many things that I felt on that first horrible morning

was the sense that people

all over the world were confronting

the same horrible circumstances that I was,

and had the same sense of helplessness and disorientation that I did.

Shocked and grieving, relatives arrive at Newport, Rhode Island.

They will seek answers and share comfort.

There were 100 Americans,

89 Egyptians, 21 Canadians,

and seven victims of other nationalities onboard.

They're all asking: "What caused this tragedy?"

Teams of investigators will pursue that question for years to come.

We are beginning what may be a long investigation,

and we are prepared to do

what it takes to find the answers

to the questions we are seeking.

In Washington, Greg Phillips, from the National Transportation Safety Board,

leads the investigation into this crash.

From the very beginning, we realized it was a very difficult case.

The airplane was in cruise, nighttime, out over the ocean.

And when it went into the ocean, there was just a little bit of floating debris,

but we had to recover the airplane from the bottom of the ocean

to begin the investigation.

The job of finding the black boxes would be difficult.

The water is about 70 metres deep,

and the tremendous force of the crash

has smashed the locator beacons off the boxes.

In this case, both the underwater locators,

which are called pingers,

which help us locate the boxes underwater, were detached.

So we had an extra-difficult job in trying to find the actual boxes

where the recording material was contained.

Nine days after the crash, the U.S. Navy's unmanned submarine, Deep Drone,

recovers the first of the two black boxes: the flight data recorder,

which stores information about what the aircraft and its systems were doing.

Four days later, the second black box, the cockpit voice recorder,

lands on the deck and is carefully transported to the NTSB laboratories.

The cockpit voice recorder captures all sounds in the cockpit

for the last 30 minutes of the flight.

The black boxes are protected to withstand impacts

of 3,400 times the force of gravity.

The recovery of the cockpit voice recorder

provided a gripping and bewildering picture of the last minutes of a disaster.

Here, investigators hope, is the key to unlock the mystery of Flight 990.

Translating the Arabic spoken in the cockpit

is a top priority at NTSB headquarters.

The cockpit voice recorder was good quality,

uh, it was easily useable and translatable by the investigation team.

The cockpit voice recorder is always just a piece of the investigation

that fits many other pieces of the puzzle.

It goes along with the flight-data-recorder data,

examination of the wreckage and all the other aspects of an investigation.

On major investigations like the crash of EgyptAir 990,

the NTSB works routinely with the FBI.

The physical evidence has to be managed in case it's needed in court.

Former FBI Assistant Director Lew Schiliro is a veteran investigator

and no stranger to air crashes.

By the time EgyptAir occurred,

we were fairly adept at looking at airline disasters,

particularly with the view of developing whether or not a terrorist incident

or a criminal act had occurred.

The FBI checked for evidence of bombs,

terrorists or terrorist targets on the flight.

Trying to determine luggage, uh, against the passenger list,

and whether or not there was anything unusual in the manifest,

whether or not the people that loaded the plane could recall anything

that would've caused them concern.

We reviewed surveillance tapes to indicate

whether or not anything unusual was loaded on that plane.

We had no evidence at all of any explosive device onboard EgyptAir that night.

At the NTSB, American investigators found no fault in the aircraft

from studying the flight-data recorder.

But Egypt's members of the investigation team

insisted that not all the evidence was in.

Much of the wreckage was still in storage on Rhode Island.

They hope the cause of the crash can be found here.

Egypt's representatives search for any possible mechanical cause for the crash.

While they search, other theories are pursued.

A study into the causes of airline crashes, published in January 2001,

points to pilot error as the cause of one-third of these accidents.

It also finds a strong connection between bad weather and pilot error.

But the crash of EgyptAir 990 occurred in clear weather with veteran pilots.

- Pull with me! - What happened in the cockpit would divide the investigation

and fuel an international controversy.

I rely on God. I rely...

October 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 crashes into the Atlantic Ocean,

killing all 217 people onboard.

The investigation develops in two directions:

fault in the airplane and pilot action.

Rumours swirl about what or who may have caused this terrible crash.

One of the key questions:

Why was the relief first officer in the cockpit hours earlier than expected?

He was supposed to replace Adel Anwar much later in the flight.

But in Cairo, Adel Anwar's older brother, Tarek,

has no problem with Adel being replaced in the cockpit.

Suppose I am with one of my friends and we are travelling in a car

and he asks me if he can drive instead of me.

Is this going to be a problem? For example,

if Adel didn't get enough sleep and Captain Gamil told him,

"Let me fly the plane instead of you and you go rest," there is no problem with that.

When the actions in the cockpit are put together with the voices recorded,

a timeline emerges that indicates a series of initially bewildering decisions.

I'll be back to you.

The timeline reveals that after Captain el-Habashi leaves the cockpit,

there's a series of sounds whose meaning can only be guessed at.

Control it.

And then the relief first officer disconnects the autopilot.

I rely on God.

Released from the autopilot's control,

the plane starts to descend, rolling to the left.

Egypt's experts described el-Batouty's decision to shut off the autopilot

as a possible reaction to an unusual movement of the aircraft,

prompting him to take manual control.

However, the leader of the NTSB investigation disagrees.

We found no reason for the autopilot to be disconnected

by fault or failure in the airplane.

Normally all aircraft movements are meant to keep passengers comfortable

as though they were on the ground.

After switching off the autopilot,

el-Batouty pushes his control column forward, lowering the elevator panels,

so the flight-data recorder indicates to the NTSB.

Then he pulls the throttles back,

reducing engine power.

This causes the plane to dive.

Egypt's investigators say el-Batouty was not trying to crash the plane,

and there may have been an elevator failure which he could not overcome.

Strangely there is no discussion of a problem on the cockpit tape.

- I rely on God. - When the Captain made his way back to the cockpit,

he asked the first officer what was going on and never received a response.

As former Director of Aviation Safety,

Bernard Loeb oversaw all air-crash investigations at the NTSB.

It is well understood that in a... in a cockpit,

a transport cockpit of virtually any airline in the world,

when a captain comes in and asks a question, the first officer will respond.

When the captain asked his questions,

Batouty did not respond.

Fighting the dive, pulling his column back all the way,

the captain cannot gain complete control of the elevator,

so he tries the throttles to power out of the dive.

What? You shut off the engines?!

He was unaware that seconds earlier,

the first officer had shut off the fuel to the engines.

Egypt's experts say that el-Batouty may have been acting out of caution.

The flight data show that a low-oil-pressure warning appeared.

That can mean the engines have flamed out.

The captain may have then ordered the fuel to the engines shut off,

as part of the procedure for restarting the engines.

- Shut the engines! - It's shut!

The NTSB consider this possible scenario, as well.

The engines shut off on a two-engine airplane,

at night, over the water.

We couldn't understand any reason why any emergency

could cause you to shut all of the power off available to the airplane

when you're heading away from the nearest airport.

Foremost among the Egyptian investigators' scenarios was a tragic elevator failure.

In Washington, at the National Transportation Safety Board,

analysis of the flight-data recorder indicates

that Captain el-Habashi was pulling back on his column to make the plane climb,

while First Officer el-Batouty appears to be pushing forward on his column,

making the plane go down.

Elevators work simply.

Pull back on the column and the elevators go up, lifting the plane.

Push forward and the elevator panels move down to make the plane descend.

They work together, but in this case,

they're going in opposite directions.

Egypt's experts argued that this crash could've been caused

by a failure in the elevator assembly, producing an elevator hardover,

a jam in the elevator controls which lock them in the down position,

plunging the aircraft into an uncontrollable dive.

They stated that First Officer el-Batouty was working to regain control

of the elevators,

and added that he and Captain el-Habashi were working together.

If there had been an elevator failure,

it could explain the first officer's unusual performance in the cockpit.

Pull!

Supporting evidence is found when analyzing fragments of the wreckage

in the hangar at Rhode Island.

Here investigators made a remarkable discovery:

three unusually sheared rivets.

These tiny parts play an important role

in the Boeing 767 elevator assembly.

Egypt's consulting experts determined that the scratches

in the metal surfaces of these rivets showed that they were sheared off

in two different directions.

One direction could be attributed to the crash.

The second could indicate that the break occurred before the crash,

and so may have indicated a jam in the elevators.

Egypt's experts drew this to the attention of the Federal Aviation Administration,

America's civil aviation regulator.

Alarmed by the potential risks,

the FAA ordered all bellcrank rivets to be inspected

on every Boeing 767 in operation around the world.

The inspections uncovered 136 sheared rivets,

and 34 aircraft were grounded until the fault was fixed.

The FAA said the problem could result

in loss of controllability of the airplane.

Egypt's investigators had uncovered a credible-sounding scenario:

that the sheared rivets in the elevator assembly of the Boeing 767

indicated a jam that could've caused an elevator hardover

that the pilots could not overcome.

NTSB investigator Greg Phillips disagreed.

Those are by design for the Boeing 767.

The controls can be split. They're designed that way,

in case one of the surfaces, the control surfaces, fails,

so that whoever is still in control of the airplane,

or can control the airplane, with a failed elevator.

Before he became an investigative writer,

William Langewiesche was a commercial airline pilot.

Flight 990's manoeuvres are programmed into a flight simulator

in order for Langewiesche to test a pilot's reactions.

To see an airplane going so wildly into a dive...

...to see the altimeters unwinding at that speed...

...to hear the horns and warning signals going off... is frightening.

Whatever the cause of the dive,

Langewiesche tries a variety of responses to recover from it.

Finally, they asked me to wait at the extreme 15 seconds.

To sit in a 767 or any airplane going out of control

and do nothing for 15 seconds.

Fifteen seconds is a long time.

Uh, it's inconceivable.

But I did it.

And even at 15 seconds,

even waiting 15 seconds,

I was able, through no particular skill,

really reacting almost as any student pilot would,

to recover the airplane, recover from the dive,

uh, before the airplane exceeded its limits.

No Boeing 767 has suffered from an elevator hardover and dive

before or since the crash.

The aviation experts hired by Egypt developed a wide range of scenarios,

citing a fault in the elevator assembly as a possible cause of the crash.

Based on the data,

the information we have from the testing that was done as a group effort,

with all the best thinking everybody had at the time,

we could not make this airplane do what it did

with any of the failure scenarios that were presented to us.

While mechanical failure scenarios were exhausted and terrorism was excluded,

the FBI continued to dig into the life of First Officer Gamil el-Batouty.

Less than three weeks after the disaster,

news media report that in the final moments before the crash,

el-Batouty said, "I have made my decision.

I put my faith in God,"

causing many to believe he might be an Islamic militant bent on destruction.

But the translation was incorrect.

From our initial review of Batouty's background,

he was a fairly religious person.

But I don't think we had anything to determine

that his religious beliefs were radical or beyond what,

uh, would've been a normal religious person.

What had Batouty said? And what does it mean?

Tawakkaltu Alallah.

Egyptian professor Amin Bonnah teaches Arabic

at Georgetown University in Washington.

Tawakkaltu means "I depend."

"I rely, I trust."

And "ala" is "on,"

and "Allah" is "God."

"Tawakkaltu Alallah,"

"On God I rely."

I depend in whatever I'm going to be embarking on.

People use it when they start a trip,

when they start driving, going back home,

we say, "Tawakkaltu Alallah."

When you have an exam,

you begin by saying "Tawakkaltu Alallah."

It's a very positive phrase.

So it's not the kind of phrase that anyone would be using

before they commit a crime,

or before they commit suicide.

Tawakkaltu Alallah.

To say this common phrase once was normal,

but el-Batouty repeated it 11 times.

Alallah.

- What's happening?! - Tawakkaltu Alallah!

I expect that... Captain Batouty would say,

uh... "There is a fire in the engines,

uh, the...

something stopped, uh,

I can see something's hitting the plane,"

anything like that.

But he go on endlessly saying Tawakkaltu Alallah. This is not logic.

For the el-Batouty family,

their grief would be compounded by the need to defend their father's honour.

When he died,

the one thing we had to reassure us

was that he had died honourably.

And now they're trying to take that away from us.

There is a lot of mechanical failures.

Why you have... only to say that it's a deliberate act,

a deliberate act, no mechanical, no weather, no mechanical, no weather.

So why? 'Cause he's an Egyptian pilot.

Chairman Jim Hall allowed that it could've been a criminal act rather than an accident.

The investigation could end up in the hands of the FBI alone.

It is only prudent for the National Transportation Safety Board

to consult with these experts and officials,

to fully evaluate this information,

prior to any final decision

on whether the responsibility for this investigation

should transfer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak,

formerly commander of the Egyptian Air Force,

had known Gamil el-Batouty, according to his nephew Walib.

Mubarak asked President Bill Clinton to intercede

to keep the crash from becoming an FBI matter.

Since the crash, Walid el-Batouty, nephew of Gamil,

has become the el-Batouty family spokesman.

You have to understand that the highest-ranking in this country,

which is the Egyptian president, was an Air Force pilot.

And he was asked and he says, "According to my experience,

it's in the tail unit; something happened there.

It's not suicide. It could be either a... mechanical failure,

a... a manufacturing fail, something."

In America, the FBI focuses on Gamil el-Batouty and the question of motive.

The FBI would learn about the man in control of EgyptAir 990,

interviewing colleagues and friends,

discovering a dark side to Gamil el-Batouty.

Investigating the cause of the crash of EgyptAir 990,

the spotlight falls on the character and history

of Relief First Officer Gamil el-Batouty.

He was 59 years old, approaching 60,

had never risen above the rank of first officer.

That may have caused him some animosity towards EgyptAir.

Had some personal issues in his own life,

in terms of financial, uh...

some issues in terms of his family members being, uh,

uh, sick, needing medical attention.

They've used the daughter in the accusation. As they said, she was sick and, uh,

and that's why maybe he committed suicide.

Uh, can I... before we go to this, I will give you the reason.

First, the doctors have already, on that particular flight, have already told him that,

"Your daughter is going positive with the medication, and everything is going fine."

And he was extremely happy. He was so excited to come back.

Gamil el-Batouty was bringing her medical records back that night,

among other things.

Okay, he bought tires for his son,

and an argument went on, on the phone, between him and his son.

My father called me to come to the airport,

because he could not carry all four tires himself.

He says, "Listen, I carry your tires all the way from the States.

You don't want to come and carry it from the airport?" It's a very natural thing.

A man is gonna commit suicide, why would he do this?

In New York, the FBI continued their investigation at the Hotel Pennsylvania,

where EgyptAir had a block booking of about 50 rooms for their crews.

The investigation that the FBI was able to do, as far as Batouty's background,

probably spanned a period of about a year or so,

at least from the records that we were able to obtain,

and from the interviews we did at the various places he stayed.

So he did have, I think, a propensity to engage in...

behaviour with some of the hotel people, in terms of sexual misconduct.

Hey, pretty lady, where did you get to?

Which, you know, at the time, really appeared to be totally out of the realm

of what was normal for a person of that status to do.

A husband and father of five,

Gamil el-Batouty was notorious for leering at and bothering female guests and hotel staff.

The FBI learned that two years before the crash,

two young women reported that he called them on their hotel-room phone,

telling them to look out the window across the courtyard.

- You have a good time too. - When they did,

they saw el-Batouty exposing himself

and reported the incident to hotel security.

His provocative behaviour would continue.

A hotel maid told the FBI that the night before the crash of EgyptAir 990,

el-Batouty had sexually harassed her again.

No, I want to talk to you. I'll give you $100 if you just come to my room.

- I'm not here for that. - Oh, sure.

- I'm here to work! Just leave me alone! - Don't be like that.

When the maid reported the approach,

another addition was made to the hotel's record

of sexual harassment of guests and staff by el-Batouty.

The allegation of the hotel, as far as they said,

it happened way before, not one day before the flight,

not one day before the flight as has been mentioned.

The hotel maid told the FBI the incident took place on the October 29, 1999,

the day before the flight.

Three months after the FBI began investigating el-Batouty,

an EgyptAir flight landed in London.

The plane's captain requested political asylum in the United Kingdom.

He claimed to have information about the cause of the crash of EgyptAir 990,

and he feared reprisals in Egypt.

Captain Hamdi Taha was a colleague of Gamil el-Batouty.

And he was walking away from his wife, his family and his country.

The FBI sent a special agent,

and along with a British security officer, he interviewed Captain Taha.

Were you aware of el-Batouty displaying...

...sexually inappropriate behaviour?

Yes. This is very important.

I heard it from pilots who I trust.

Batouty got into trouble for sexual misbehaviour in New York with maids,

and following women and so on.

The airline tolerated this for a while,

and they told him several times:

"Maybe you can get away with this normally,

but this is America.

You represent our country.

You cannot do these things!"

Captain Taha's information was secondhand,

but his description of el-Batouty meeting with the airline's chief pilot

was intriguing.

Hatem Rushdy went to see Batouty

the night they took Flight 990.

They had a meeting in the hotel.

He told him that what he had done

could not be covered up and something had to be done.

The flight back to Cairo from New York would be his last flight.

Gamil, we go back many years together...

...but this will be your last flight to the United States.

He would not be flying to America anymore.

Batouty... had just had...

these big privileges taken away from him.

And he was humiliated.

So...

I think that what happened was this.

He must have said to himself:

"If this is going to be my last flight,

it will be Hatem Rushdy's last flight also!"

Certainly, within various corporations

where people bring weapons into the office in an attempt to take revenge

against people that they feel have aggrieved them,

perhaps Batouty felt that EgyptAir had been the cause of some of his issues.

And, unfortunately, in this case,

it was the kind of office that was flying at 33,000 feet.

The FBI provides Taha's interviews to the NTSB.

Egyptian officials ask for another EgyptAir pilot to be interviewed.

Mohamed Badrawy had known el-Batouty for 40 years.

Interviewed at the NTSB,

he described discussing with Captain Rushdy what to do about el-Batouty's behaviour.

Do you know if Hatem Rushdy was aware of this... this situation with Batouty?

Well, of course, he knew.

But he pretended not to know, I think, because Hatem Rushdy is the chief pilot.

Badrawy confirms that Hatem Rushdy is upset

about el-Batouty's harassment of women at the hotel.

So Badrawy takes Rushdy's concerns to his old friend.

And if he didn't listen to you, what did you tell him was going to happen?

Nothing much, really. You see, he was on his way out.

We normally don't touch people when they're approaching 60.

I know! I know. I'm not saying you are doing something wrong.

They are saying you're doing something wrong.

I know you are my friend.

We have a little patience and... then they're out.

Badrawy would ask Rushdy to be patient with his old friend,

considering that el-Batouty only had three months to go before retirement.

We have been in the Air Force for 40 years.

And all he needs is... a few more months.

Badrawy's interview confirmed that Rushdy did believe

el-Batouty's behaviour had to be dealt with.

And he denied Taha's claim of a meeting between the two on the night of the crash.

But Captain Taha was not done.

He had another compelling story to add.

In London, an Egyptian pilot has requested political asylum,

and is offering an insider's view

of the most controversial tragedy in the history of EgyptAir.

Captain Taha revealed to the FBI how EgyptAir briefed its pilots about the crash.

When they had done the transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder,

the EgyptAir chief of operations called all flight crew

to a special meeting in Cairo and told us the facts.

Just the facts.

No commentary,

no explanation of any technical problem.

He did not say anything,

but all we pilots realized that this was not an accident.

And then he told us not to talk to anyone about it.

"Don't talk to your family, don't talk on the phone,

don't talk to each other," he told us.

All of us realized...

that Batouty...

had done this on purpose.

For the American families involved,

this was a case of 216 murders and one suicide.

In Egypt, big, close, extended families combine with a strong religious faith

to deny that Egyptians commit suicide.

The story has many sides. It has to do with...

with religion,

it has to do with, uh, beliefs, it has to do with the culture.

I think, until today, still in the Egyptian culture,

uh, people don't believe...

that Muslims,

or that Egyptians,

or that people coming from that culture,

uh, commit suicide.

Cultural differences were not the only impediments to this investigation.

One of the difficulties that we did have was that,

when we went over to Egypt and attempted to really get into his background, uh,

it became a very sensitive issue for the Egyptian government.

FBI efforts to learn about el-Batouty's personal life and family relations

would be stymied.

It became, uh,

almost to the point where we were never really able

to develop all the things that we needed to get at.

Finally, on March 21, 2002,

after a nearly $10 million investigation

over two years and five months,

the NTSB publishes its report and determines that:

The Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority responded angrily and their response read in part:

The NTSB's former Director of Aviation Safety

takes exception to the Egyptian view.

What was unprofessional...

was the insistence by the Egyptians...

...in the face of irrefutable evidence

to anyone who knows anything about investigating, um, airplane accidents,

and who knows anything about aerodynamics and airplanes,

was the fact that this airplane

was intentionally flown into the ocean.

No scenario that the Egyptians came up with,

or that we came up with, um,

in which there were some sort of mechanical failure in the elevator control system

would either match the flight profile,

or was a situation in which the airplane was not recoverable.

Like many of his countrymen,

the loyal nephew cannot believe his uncle Gamil was a mass murderer.

This is a simple plane crash.

It was put and made like this for... for no reason.

It shows that it's a cover-up.

Greg Phillips takes pride in having thoroughly investigated every lead and every scenario.

When we sign on to be accident investigators,

we do it with the idea that we're gonna keep the next one from happening,

not to cover up one that did

because of whatever reason may be given to us.

I've never known that to happen,

I've never even known it to come close to happening.

There continue to be differing perspectives on the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990,

and unanswered questions remain for broken and damaged families.

For many of them, answers to how and why this plane crashed

will forever be a painful mystery.

difuze