Original subtitles

In the dark of night over the Red Sea

a pilot struggles to control his passenger jet.

Retard power. Retard power. Retard power.

The plane seems to have a life of its own.

Pull up, pull up.

Something's wrong with the plane.

I heard a scream, a noise.

After that I didn't hear anything.

The sands of Egypt hide

thousands of years of history.

Monuments to ancient civilizations

dominate the landscape.

But for sun loving Europeans,

Egypt is also a resort destination,

where the most important sand is on the beach.

The town of Sharm el-Sheikh

is several hundred kilometers south east of Cairo.

Perched on the Red Sea, it's a natural destination

for people looking for a little rest and relaxation.

Sharm-el Sheikh is quite popular with Europeans.

The reason is where can you get a very warm sea

with a five-hour flight?

You have the Red Sea

which is crystal clear, beautiful mountains.

It's just extraordinary.

The city's popularity is growing.

More than four million people a year

use Sharm el-Sheikh's airport.

In the early days of 2004,

tourists aren't the only ones drawn to the local beaches.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also in the region

visiting Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

Just after two in the morning on January the 3rd,

many vacationers are still out on the town...

but fifty-three-year-old Captain Khedr Abdullah

is just starting his day.

He's renowned for his punctuality.

A former officer in the Egyptian Air Force, Khedr is now a highly

respected Captain with the charter company, Flash Airlines.

He always liked to pack his own suitcase.

He wouldn't let me do it for him.

He always said I would like to prepare my own

things to make sure I don't forget anything.

He was very precise on what he wanted

and what he would take with him.

Captain Khedr meets up with

his twenty-five-year-old First Officer, Amr El-Shafy.

Together, they'll fly out of

Sharm el-Sheikh heading for Paris.

El-Shafy is young enough to be the Captain's son.

The early morning flight isn't for everyone.

Pascal Mercier and his family are supposed to be

on the Flash jet but changed their plans.

I was booked on the Flash Airline Flight.

When my agency told me that I had to wake up very early

and then get to change planes in Cairo,

I said this is really stupid.

I mean my daughter was like two years old

and the other ones were like six and eight so really

I didn't feel comfortable about changing planes and so on.

For other tourists, the cheap tickets that

Flash offers are worth the trouble of getting up early.

France Thullier was able to

bring his entire family to Egypt.

They need the break.

My brother-in-law had just lost his father,

so he brought his children, his mother,

and his wife there just to have a good time,

not to see the sites or anything,

just to have a good time.

That's what Sharm El-Sheikh is known for.

Fatima is also heading back to Paris

after a vacation in Sharm.

The mother of five is flying alone.

Before takeoff, she calls her nephew in France.

Hi.

I was asleep when she called.

I didn't really want to get into a conversation with her.

She was someone who called you for everything.

She needed to be reassured.

So even though she had a five or six-hour flight ahead of her,

she just wanted to make sure that

I would be there to pick her up at the airport.

In all, 1-hundred and 48 passengers

and crew settle into their seats aboard the jet.

It's five am. In the cockpit,

Ashraf Abdel Hamid is the third member of the crew.

He's training as a First Officer,

although he has worked for years piloting corporate jets.

None of the crewmembers are happy with the poor

quality of the weather information they're

getting from the local Air Traffic Controller.

They didn't say sky clear,

they said clouds and sky clear. How? The two are opposite.

Ask them about ceiling.

No ceiling and clouds and sky clear.

Maybe it's scattered? Maybe he mean's scattered.

Good morning.

The Captain is also frustrated that

one of his instruments isn't working.

Although the engineer agrees there's a problem,

it's not serious enough to fix.

The men laugh it off at the expense of the first officer.

It was probably caused by Amr making a heavy landing.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

On behalf of Captain Khedr and his entire crew,

we welcome you on board Flash Airlines' Boeing 737-300.

It's still hours before dawn

when the plane lifts off.

The Flash Airlines flight will head

out over the Red Sea before turning toward Cairo.

The jet climbs through a pitch black night.

Without a moon to light the scene, it's hard

for the passengers to see much of anything out their windows.

In the cockpit, the simple turn

over the Red Sea is taking a bizarre twist.

See what the aircraft just did?

Captain Khedr doesn't like

the way his plane is behaving.

Turning right sir. What?

Aircraft is turning right.

Turning right? How turning right?

The plane is supposed to be

turning left on its way to Cairo.

Instead, it's turning in the opposite direction.

Okay. Come out.

The Captain tries to get his plane back on course

but his situation just gets worse.

Overbank.

Knowing he's in trouble,

the Captain tells the first officer to engage the autopilot.

Autopilot. Autopilot!

But it doesn't work.

No autopilot commander.

The 737 is now flying almost completely on its side.

Something's wrong with the plane!

The plane gains speed

as it spirals towards the Red Sea.

Just minutes after takeoff, the plane is out of control.

Diving toward the water,

it's traveling at more than 7-hundred kilometers an hour.

Everyone on board is running out of time.

Just minutes after takeoff, an early morning

flight has become a desperate battle for survival.

A passenger jet filled with French families

is plunging towards the Red Sea.

Everyone on board can feel the tremendous speed

and gut-wrenching turns.

The enormous G-Forces are making it

difficult for Captain Khedr Abdullah to fly the plane.

Ashraf Abdel Hamid, the third member of the flight crew,

tells the Captain to slow the plane down.

Retard power, retard power, retard power!

The plane is traveling

so fast it's threatening to tear itself apart.

After flying almost upside down,

the crew is finally beginning to bring their plane under control.

Then, they hear the ground proximity warning.

They're getting dangerously close to the Red Sea.

Pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up.

Pascal Mercier and his family

are staying at a beachfront hotel.

My daughter woke up suddenly screaming like hell,

screaming like if something happened.

I didn't hear the crash but maybe she did.

It's okay sweetie.

It's just before five in the morning,

minutes after the plane took off from the airport.

It's disappeared from local radar screens.

By the time the sun rises, the crash site is found, -

but there's little for rescuers to do.

The plane shattered on impact.

A post card is found saying simply,

I think this card will arrive after me.

Pieces of debris litter the surface

but most of the plane has sunk beneath the waves.

There are no survivors.

All 1-hundred and 48 people on board the plane are dead.

Flight 604 was to land at Charles De Gaulle

airport in Paris in the morning.

As family and friends wait, officials list the plane

as delayed and then slowly break the news of the accident.

They asked me, are you waiting for

someone from Sharm el-Sheikh?

You say yes. Then they say to you could you come with us?

We're going to take you to a hotel.

At the hotel, we'll explain it all to you.

It was very strange

since we were greeted in a hotel and we passed people who

were leaving happy because they were looking for the same

information as us but their families were not on the list.

They came with a paper in hand.

Here, yes, Madame Hjiaj, Fatima.

We apologize that you have to learn it this way

but she's dead.

Later, on his voice mail,

Mohammed Hjiaj hears Fatima's message sent during the flight.

I heard a scream, a noise.

After that I didn't hear anything.

Captain Khedr's wife

hears about the crash from her son.

My son called me from abroad and told me that

he heard there was an accident in Flash Airlines.

I was in disbelief for a while until it became reality.

It was a very big shock for me.

In resort hotels,

workers check the empty rooms of those who were on Flight 604.

But one of the rooms is occupied.

Mister Mercier.

This guy from the hotel, the hotel staff began to cry.

He was really shocked, happily shocked to see us.

He thought we were on the flight with everybody else.

They're, they're here.

In my hotel eighty-two people were on that flight,

eighty-two people.

It was really, really strange.

Really, really heavy, but we were really lucky.

There had been no Mayday call from the plane,

no warning to Air Traffic Control

that something was wrong.

With the plane crashing just minutes after

it left the airport, there are immediate concerns that

a bomb had brought the jet down.

The plane had just taken off and it looked very strange

why this accident happened so quickly after takeoff.

When investigators examine the plane's flight

path, they discover it would have gone directly over the

town where Egyptian Leader Hosni Mubarak kept a vacation home.

It's also close to the house where British prime

minister Tony Blair and his family were staying.

Blair and his family were supposed to leave

from the same airport that day.

Security around the prime minister

is immediately heightened.

Two days after the crash,

authorities receive a phone call.

Terrorists from Yemen claim responsibility for the crash.

They say it is a protest against a French law banning

the Muslim headscarf, the hijab, in public schools.

But in spite of the phone call and the rumors swirling

around Egypt, investigators quickly rule out terrorism.

If you have a wreckage

distributed in a very large area,

that means the plane was disintegrating in the air,

and due to an explosion

it would be disintegrating in a wide area.

In this case, there were very, very few pieces

and all located in a very small area.

So this indicated that the plane was intact

and went into the water intact.

If it wasn't terrorism,

what had ripped the plane from the sky so quickly?

Investigators face an enormous challenge.

The plane has sunk below the surface of the Red Sea.

Divers have to fight off sharks that are drawn to the carnage.

The rescue teams find few bodies intact.

The aircraft and most of the 1-hundred and 48 passengers

and crew have sunk over 1-thousand meters

to the bottom of the Red Sea.

The first task of investigators is to find the aircraft's

flight data and cockpit voice recorders, the black boxes.

If they survived the crash, they will now be on the seabed.

But this part of the Red Sea has never been charted.

With so many French tourists involved,

the French government offers to help in any way it can.

The French immediately responded by sending a boat

specially equipped with a robot to search the bottom of the sea.

But the wreckage is too deep.

The sub that the French boat has can't survive the enormous

pressure at the bottom of the sea.

The investigators desperately need another submarine,

but they're running out of time.

The black box transmits a radio signal,

but the battery only lasts for thirty days.

If investigators can't find it within a month,

the mystery of flight 604 may never be solved.

Getting to the black boxes before the timed

pingers stopped transmitting was always a very worrisome

aspect to all the investigation team.

Everybody was working twenty-four hours,

round the clock to try to salvage these

and try to locate them first.

While the recovery effort continues,

family and friends of the victims

begin to mourn those who died.

They pressure investigators to solve the mystery.

It's the biggest air disaster involving French

nationals, the biggest in the history of civil aviation.

American, French and Egyptian experts join forces.

While waiting for the plane's black boxes to be recovered,

they also begin focusing on Flash Airlines itself.

Flying just two planes,

it was one of a number of low-cost charter companies

that had been competing for customers in Europe.

In the last ten years, there had been a rapid expansion

of budget airlines throughout this part of the world.

Offering inexpensive, no-frills service

they fought for a piece of the holiday market.

Seaside resorts like Sharm el-Sheikh were

one of the many destinations they serve.

Now one of the ways in which

they provide this extremely cheap travel

is by operating their airplanes twenty-four hours a day.

Operating on such tight schedules means

the planes are flown constantly.

Former Flash passengers step forward to complain

about other flights.

There are a lot of stories.

I was flying home after a vacation...

A year before the crash, while flying

from Sharm el-Sheikh to Bologna, one passenger recalls

seeing flames pouring from a Flash Airline's jet.

Hey! Hey! The engine's on fire! Look!

The flaming aircraft is forced to make

an emergency landing.

Investigators learn that in 2002,

the Swiss Aviation Authority performed a surprise

inspection on the same plane that would later crash.

The pilots' oxygen masks are missing.

There aren't enough oxygen tanks.

Some of the cockpit instruments aren't working.

It's enough for the Swiss to ground the flight for eight

hours until the company repairs the plane.

A few days later,

Flash Airlines was banned from flying in Switzerland.

Another ban occurred in Poland.

In Norway, Tour operators stopped contracting with Flash.

It's a rare event for an airline to be

banned from operating into a country.

They must have done something dramatically wrong,

especially when it comes to safety.

With mounting concerns

about the safety record of Flash Airlines,

investigators comb through the company's paperwork.

They discover that the most recent maintenance

records for the plane that crashed were never duplicated.

They've gone missing with the aircraft.

The lack of having copies of the technical log

and all of them being on board, of course this is

a violation and uh civil aviation here issued uh

very clear instructions that this should not happen.

The French authorities agree that there

are serious questions about Flash.

They now ban the company from flying in France.

While there are concerns about the state

of the company's planes,

there are no such issues when it comes to the crew of flight 604.

Captain Khedr was considered not only a flying ace but a national

war hero for his performance in the Yom Kippur war.

During his career he not only flew sophisticated fighter

jets, but also a variety of large cargo aircraft.

He had over 7-thousand hours of flying

experience as well as 2-thousand hours as a flight instructor.

All the evidence shows that Captain Khedr was a model pilot.

With the aircraft and its black box data recorders still

hidden deep under the Red Sea, investigators wonder,

was this a case of a superb pilot

fighting to save a decrepit plane?

See what the aircraft did?

On a moonless January night,

a Flash Airlines 737 spiraled wildly into the Red Sea.

All 1-hundred and 48 people on board were killed.

Investigators trying to find out why the plane went down have

uncovered a history of safety problems with the airline.

But trying to prove that there was anything

wrong with the plane that crashed is difficult.

Much of the wreckage has sunk deep beneath the waves.

Investigators have been unable

to find the flight's black boxes.

Whenever an airplane crashes into the water there's

always a fear by investigators that the cockpit voice

recorder and the flight data recorder may not be recovered.

Those two boxes in and of themselves give

the investigator a very good picture and without them

could make the investigation process very, very difficult.

Finally, after several days of searching,

a breakthrough.

A French research ship hears the locator signals

given off by the black boxes.

A remotely operated sub drops down over 1-thousand meters.

The violence of the crash has spread

the wreckage over a wide area.

Two weeks after the crash, both the cockpit voice recorder

and the flight data recorder

are recovered from the bottom of the sea.

Investigators finally have some hard evidence.

The Egyptian, French and American team

examines the critical devices in Cairo.

After the two black boxes are found,

the salvage effort wraps up.

Other than a select number of small pieces,

the rest of the plane is too deep to recover.

The cost to continue would be too great.

Without the wreckage itself,

investigators concentrate on what they do have.

They hope the black boxes will recreate the final

minutes of the doomed plane.

One of the things we did to depict

the path of the aircraft was we created an animation based on

the data we got from the flight data recorder and from radar.

The flight data recorder paints

a devastating picture.

Shortly after takeoff, the plane began heading left,

just as it was supposed to.

But then it quickly started banking in the other direction.

The cockpit voice recorder shows that the turn caught

the captain off guard.

Turning right sir. What? How turning right?

Analyzing the cockpit voice recorder showed that

the pilots were experiencing definitely some kind

of an abnormality, a problem that they could not understand.

The investigators sift through the flight

data to find some explanation for the jet's bizarre movement.

Perhaps some mechanical fault was forcing

the plane off course.

And there is an indication that something was

wrong with the Flash jet before it took off.

On the runway, the captain and the ground engineer

discussed an electrical malfunction.

But it's impossible to tell from the cockpit voice recorder

exactly what the problem was.

We can't be sure which equipment was being

referred to by the aircraft captain and the engineer

when they were discussing faulty equipment.

Not enough parts were brought up from the bottom of the sea

to be able to determine that.

And tragically,

the ground engineer was also on the flight.

We believe from the data we're looking at on the

flight data recorder, that there's a very high possibility

that the plane was tending to turn to the right by itself.

But exactly what had gone wrong?

A thorough accident investigation can take years.

But in the case of Flash Flight 604 there are unique challenges.

The problem with accident investigation is that it's

very time consuming and resource intensive especially

when we don't have an airplane to physically look at.

You want to be absolutely sure about the facts, conditions

and circumstances before you publish that information.

Family and friends of the victims are becoming

more and more frustrated.

As the months pass, they demand answers.

We were led to protest outside the Egyptian embassy

because we had no news.

Eleven months after the disaster,

we had no message, no information.

Shortly after the protest,

Egyptian investigators release a Factual Report.

It contains all of the information

from the black boxes.

But the report does not reach any conclusions

about why the jet crashed.

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.

With a situation as complicated as this one,

the investigators don't yet have any answers.

The only thing they can do is to keep looking.

Investigators discuss several possible scenarios that

could have been responsible for the plane's erratic course.

You look into every hypothetical scenario that

would create a similar profile and then you see

if this profile fit the data that you have put together.

Fifty different theories are examined

in minute detail.

In the process of looking into all

the possible hypothetical scenarios

we proceeded by eliminating those that did not fit the data.

Investigators travel to the United States

to test the most likely ideas in a sophisticated simulator.

If they can force the simulator to repeat

the movements of the Flash Jet,

they might be able to figure out why the plane crashed.

The results are brought back to Cairo.

There are only four mechanical faults that could have

produced the flight path of the doomed jet.

Investigators believe the key to the crash is to find out

why the plane began turning off course.

These four scenarios were all related to what

would cause an uncommanded bank.

So we were left with these as causes

that we could not rule out.

Two of the scenarios involved

the spoilers on the plane's right wing.

Spoilers lift up from the top surface of the wing.

By producing drag, or spoiling the airflow,

they slow the plane down.

If the pilot's control wheel,

or the cables that connect it to the spoiler jammed,

it could have forced the plane off course.

Problems with the spoilers are one explanation

but there's no physical proof.

And while there were maintenance problems with Flash planes,

none of them had to do with the jet's spoilers.

The team searches for another explanation.

Another potential cause of the crash is the plane's ailerons.

This part of a plane's wing controls

the angle of a plane's turn.

A malfunctioning aileron could have caused

the plane to roll to the right.

Again, if the crew couldn't fix the problem,

the plane would have begun to spiral into the sea.

While so-called aileron trim runaway would create

a flight path like the one seen during the crash,

once again there's no physical proof to support the theory.

And typically, aileron trim runaway

can be physically overcome by pilots.

All he would have had to do was overpower using more

force to move the control wheel in an opposite direction.

Overbank.

When they listen to the cockpit voice recorder,

the investigators are puzzled by the constant

discussion of the plane's autopilot.

The Captain asked for the autopilot to be turned on but

it had no effect and the plane began to plummet to the sea.

And earlier in the cockpit recording,

investigators uncover another curious exchange.

Captain Kehdr began the initial turn over the Red Sea

manually but decided to let the autopilot take over.

Autopilot.

The flight data recorder shows that the

autopilot was indeed turned on as the plane climbed.

Not yet.

But then the Captain appears to change his mind.

The plane's flight data recorder shows that the autopilot

was only activated for three seconds.

But investigators wonder if the autopilot had malfunctioned

and stayed in command of the jet.

The automated system could have continued to control

the plane, flying it to the right,

even after the pilots thought it had been disengaged.

The malfunction of the autopilot of course took

a lot of work from us

because it was nearly impossible to show that it did not

happen and quite impossible to show that it did happen.

So but it was always a very prominent possibility because

it would give a very, very close scenario to what was happening.

Perhaps most puzzling of all

though is that no matter what happened to the plane,

it appeared to be under control just before it crashed.

Moments before impact,

the Captain was seemingly back in command of his airplane.

If there had been some crippling mechanical problem,

why did it seem to disappear?

Some members of the team want to consider

something besides mechanical fault, the pilots themselves.

I think the major concern for the United States

was that the Human Factors elements of this accident

weren't thoroughly explored.

Perhaps the high esteem given to Egyptian

pilots was getting in the way.

In Egypt, pilots are very respected

and in particular Air Force pilots are very highly regarded.

For the past 26 years, the country's president has

been a highly decorated Air Force officer.

In an environment like this,

the pilot is somewhat immune to suspicion.

When something goes wrong the natural tendency

is to blame the equipment.

And on this flight, the pilot was a war hero

with thousands of hours of experience.

Studying the flight data recorders again,

the investigators discover something peculiar.

Even before the plane's bizarre turn to the right,

three things all seem to happen at the same time.

Instead of a smooth left turn,

the plane begins to come out of its turn early.

The nose starts to rise,

and the plane's airspeed decreases noticeably.

But during this time, the pilot says nothing.

It seems that he's unaware of the changes to his flight path.

I've flown out of Sharm el-Sheikh at nighttime

and in the same type of aircraft and in no way should

the pilot allow the airspeed to drop by as much as 30 knots

or the bank angle to change beyond five degrees without

clearly stating the reasons for the change in the flight path.

Some investigators consider a provocative

theory that might explain this seemingly bizarre behaviour.

Perhaps Captain Khedr had been affected by vertigo.

Vertigo is a physiological condition that would exist with

any person, not just pilots, and it's based on the inner ear.

Over a dark ocean without a defined visual horizon,

no ground lights, the pilot may not be able to perceive

visually whether he was flying up, down, left or right.

And if the fluid in his inner ear was moving or he tilted

his head, that may induce a sensation, a physiological

sensation that may cause the pilot to believe the airplane

is flying straight and level when it's actually turning.

The plane's flight path is ideal

for creating a sense of vertigo.

The Flash Airline jet took off into a moonless night.

Captain Khedr was flying manually,

and began to turn as he was climbing.

Heading out over dark water,

it would be very difficult using just his senses

for Captain Khedr to know exactly where he was.

Roger when ready, god willing.

Left turn to establish Three Zero Six Sharm VOR.

It is actually a very high workload situation

and when there are no visual cues outside

because it's a moonless night and you're over featureless

territory with no lights in it, you really as a professional

pilot should be totally aware of the fact that this is

a situation in which you could get disorientated.

It's a classic, it's happened so many times,

it's killed so many people in the last ten years.

When the plane was supposed to be turning

slowly left, the control wheel began inching towards the right.

Perhaps the Captain was making the turn

without even being aware of it.

When you study the movement

of the aircraft control surfaces,

it appears that something was guiding

Captain Khedr to the right.

Now that could have been a false horizon

or something he'd seen outside of his window.

See what the aircraft just did?

Or perhaps he believed he was actually correcting

a problem with the plane itself.

He thinks he's gained his flight path again and,

all of a sudden, at this moment,

he receives contradictory information.

Turning right, sir. What?

Aircraft is turning right.

The contradictory information

adds to the pilot's confusion.

He believes he's fixing a problem

when he's told his problems have just started.

In this particular instance,

not only are you trying to fly the airplane and understand

situationally what's happening but you are going through

the mental gymnastics because your expectations are one way.

Meanwhile, you have the first officer who's telling him

something that's totally different.

Aircraft is turning right.

Egyptians investigators agree that

Captain Khedr may have suffered some

form of disorientation during the flight.

But they don't believe

it was the only problem the crew was dealing with.

I don't really have a very clear indication

that it was disorientation but it's possible.

There was a recovery from disorientation.

The time to find out the problem and take the corrective

action needed was more than the time left before impact.

No matter what role disorientation

played in the crash, investigators are about to learn

that the crew wasn't properly trained to deal with it.

Flash Airlines never provided the pilots with basic

information that could have saved their lives.

It's been two years

since an Egyptian charter plane smashed into the Red Sea.

1-hundred and 48 people were killed.

Investigators trying to figure out why Flash Airlines

flight 604 crashed face immense challenges.

Most of the wreck is still deep under water.

By carefully examining the plane's black boxes,

the investigators believe that disorientation may have

played a role in the accident.

The pitch-black night and the featureless sea caused

the pilot to become confused about what was happening.

But mechanical problems may also have plagued the plane.

As they continue to try to solve the mystery,

investigators make a startling discovery.

Officials at Flash Airlines reveal that they hadn't

provided the pilots with Crew Resource Management training

although it was a requirement for the company.

It might have helped the crew

deal with their horrifying situation.

Crew Resource Management is a program where pilots

are trained to work together rather than as individuals.

Had the pilots of Flash Air 604 received a formal CRM

training program, the outcome of this flight

may have been substantially different.

American investigators believe the very junior

First Officer may have felt the plane

was in trouble before the Captain did, but failed

to offer suggestions to his much more experienced co-worker.

What? Aircraft is turning right.

Nor did he attempt to take control of the plane.

Right.

Formal CRM training

would have empowered the first officer,

who had the best situational awareness

and the most information about the position

of the airplane to take command of the airplane when he saw that

the captain wasn't taking the appropriate corrective action.

An earlier conversation in the cockpit,

before take off, may reveal why the young First Officer

would have been reluctant to challenge the Captain.

Yesterday we were coming in at dusk

and the sun was two two.

I felt I could hardly see the runway

and he's already saying in sight.

What in sight? Age, sir.

It may not have meant to be insulting but it

may have reinforced the First Officer's feeling that he

was the student and the Captain was the teacher.

I am unable to raise my eyes and he says in sight.

Where in sight? MAX: It is going to serve as negative feedback.

The young first officer is bound to hesitate.

He doesn't want to be wrong again.

He doesn't want to lose the respect of an Air Force general.

In a crew, an effort must be made to bring together

people who are able to co-pilot, not a crew in which one person

pilots and the other person looks on without saying a word.

But the Captain

and the co-pilot weren't alone in the cockpit.

A third crewmember with more experience than the first

officer was also there.

He too never said anything until the final seconds of the flight.

Otherwise, how will we know when we clear the cloud?

We hear him speak very clearly and very openly

all during the time before the engines start up.

He was in conversation with the first officer and with the

captain so this experienced person,

being very quiet all through,

we believe that he, if he saw any of the crew members

doing something that he should not be doing, or uh not doing

something that he should be doing would have said something.

Retard power, retard power.

But the only words he said was retard

the throttles at the later stage of the event,

shows that that's the only thing he saw that should be done.

Even if the co-pilot had taken control sooner,

there's no way to know if he could have saved the jet.

Whatever took place on flight 604 happened quickly.

And since the plane had just taken off, the crew had

little time to react before they crashed into the sea.

The final report on the Flash Airlines crash

was released in March 2006.

There are no clear answers.

Egyptian officials say that any of four mechanical problems

could have caused the crash.

They say disorientation may have played a role

but it's not the reason behind the accident.

American investigators refuse to blame the plane.

Instead, they say the problem lies with the airline,

which didn't sufficiently train their crews.

The pilots are responding based on skills, abilities,

knowledge and what they got out of training.

If the training was deficient, that's a company responsibility.

Two months after the crash,

Flash Airlines went out of business.

And as a result of the Flash 604 tragedy,

new rules came into place to ensure that in the future

aircraft safety violations will be judged more harshly.

The Flash Airlines crash gave the final political

impetus to a move to create a European black list where

if one state banned an airline then all the other European

states would automatically ban that airline also.

The Egyptian investigation

concluded with an important recommendation.

We have recommended that some kind of training or

awareness program should be made to be

able to have the pilot observe another being disoriented

early and what he should do, to first maintain a safe flight,

second to pull the pilot, pull the pilot

from his disorientation back to orientation.

Was there a mechanical problem

at the heart of the crash?

Investigators will likely never know.

With so much of the plane still at the bottom of the Red Sea,

questions will always remain for investigators

and everyone else who was affected by the crash.

I lost my nephews and my niece. They were just kids.

What future would they have had?

How can you put a price on that? What a waste?

The families will never be able to fully mourn,

me included because we'll never know what's really happened.