Original subtitles

An airbus heading from Paris to Cairo disappears over the Mediterranean.

A plane with some 58 passengers on board has gone missing. It is Egypt Air Flight

804.

Radar data provides the first clue.

And then they started spiraling.

What is going on in this cockpit?

The cockpit voice recorder, found deep on the sea floor, reveals a horrifying

detail.

There's a plane!

It has to be...

One of the worst things that could happen.

A shocked world demands answers.

We owe it to the traveling public. We owe it to the victims' families.

The accident investigation stalls.

Then, six years later, an Italian journalist reports an astonishing new

theory. The people need to know the truth.

A late night flight to Cairo cruises 37,000 feet over Greece.

Radar check.

Looks clear.

Thank you, Gap.

I like the way that sounds.

Mohamed Shoker is in command of tonight's flight.

With more than 6,000 hours of flying time, he's just been promoted to

captain.

The initial upgrade to captain is a...

a real pinnacle event for an aviator it's it's something you work years to

attain winds are forecast no deviation first officer mohammed

assem has 2700 hours of flying time he too is an ambitious pilot

being a pilot in egypt is one of the most prestigious jobs in

northern africa hi there could i have a cup of coffee up here Make that two,

please. Make that two, please.

This was routine flight. This was a normal crew.

Both pilots were very well trained and experienced.

The pilots fly for Egypt Air, a state-owned airline and the flagship

carrier of Egypt.

Egypt Air is one of the best airlines in Africa and one of the oldest

airlines in the world.

Flight 804 is two and a half hours into its journey from Paris to Cairo.

The pilots are flying an Airbus A320.

The A320 is one of the more modern fly-by-wire computer-enhanced airplanes.

It's an extremely reliable veteran workhorse in the commercial aviation

industry.

On board the plane tonight are 56 international passengers, Egyptian,

French, British and Canadian.

The five-person cabin crew has a quieter night than usual.

The plane is only half full.

Hello, hello.

Egypt Air Flight 804.

Flight level 370.

Squawk number 7624.

Captain Shoker updates controllers on the flight's progress.

Egypt Air 804, radar contact.

Thank you very much.

Egyptair 804, maintain flight level 370 and current heading.

Greek controllers oversee the airspace flight 804 is flying through.

Maintain 370 and current heading. If Haris to Polly.

How's the coffee?

Strong, just what I need.

One of the challenges when you're flying on what they call the backside of the

clock, where the technical term is a circadian low, and this is when your

body normally would be asleep, but you're having to press it because you're

on duty.

Egypt Air 804, contact Cairo Center now on 125.300.

As flight 804 leaves Greek airspace, the controller hands it off to Egyptian

control.

But the pilots don't acknowledge the instruction.

The fact that they missed the call, understandable.

Perhaps they were in conversation and just missed it.

Egypt Air 804, contact Cairo Center 125.300.

After a second call, the controller waits for confirmation from the pilots.

There's still no reply.

After the second or third call, that becomes unusual.

Something's wrong here.

Then flight 804 disappears from radar.

Keitel, have you made contact with 804?

No, and we don't have them on radar either.

As the minutes tick by, there's no word from the pilots.

Flight 804 doesn't arrive in Cairo.

Normally, crashes occur during takeoff, during landing, somebody runs into

a mountain.

But at 37,000 feet, not a lot of things that can go wrong.

So in that particular case, that was a bit of a mystery.

As day breaks, Egyptian, French, and Greek ships and aircraft search for the

plane north of the Egyptian coast.

So here is the breaking news tonight. A plane that reportedly has some 58

passengers on board has gone missing. A plane with some 58 passengers on board

has gone missing. It is Egypt Air Flight 804.

It was en route from Paris to Cairo.

Families gather at Cairo airport, hoping for news.

One day after flight 804 disappears, search teams find debris from the plane.

Around the same time the aircraft went down in Europe, we faced a lot of

terrorist attack in France, in Belgium and in other parts.

I thought that this could be a terrorist attack.

The question inevitably being asked here in Paris is whether or not the plane was

sabotaged.

Any survivors?

None have been found.

An investigation into the crash of Flight 804 is launched.

66 people are feared dead.

And time is running out.

The case falls within the jurisdiction of the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority

Investigation Directorate.

The Bureau will do whatever it can to assist.

Investigators from France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for Civil

Aviation Safety, the BEA.

assist because the a320 is built in europe and french nationals were on

board what do we know so far very little i'm afraid it was

at cruise and then it was gone it's a world wide news event and

so the pressure's on and as an investigator you have to say no we're

going to do this methodically and properly

The current and tide could scatter debris hundreds of kilometers from the

point of impact.

But satellite images show an oil slick on the water.

If you find an oil slick, there is a high likelihood that the airplane

impacted the water in this area. The more you can narrow the search down, the

higher the likelihood you'll find the wreckage on the seafloor.

Hopefully the ROVs will find it soon.

The oil slick lies on water 3,000 meters, or nearly 10,000 feet, deep.

Sophisticated undersea technology and expertise are needed to explore such

extreme depths.

Anything?

BEA investigators lead an advanced dive team in the hunt for the wreckage of

Flight 804.

Their ships are equipped with sonar units capable of detecting the pingers

on black boxes.

Underwater searches actually have a good side and a bad side.

They kind of slow things down and allow investigators to kind of get their act

together a bit.

It allows them to accept wreckage gradually rather than in a big pile, and

that's a good thing.

Other than that, on the bad side, it takes a long time.

Did you pick up on anything unusual?

As the search for the plane continues, the investigation on shore gains pace.

They were passing through Greek airspace.

Egypt Air 804, maintain flight level 370 and current heading.

Can the Greek controller who last handled the flight provide investigators

with any clues?

In the early days of any investigation, you want to interview the air traffic

controller. Did the crew make any...

ATC communications advising that they had a mechanical problem.

He spoke to us in Greek.

He sounded very relaxed.

It was all very routine.

Any emergency calls?

No. None.

There had been a conversation between the aircraft and the Greek traffic

control only moments before this event took place It's completely inexplicable

as to why communication would suddenly stop Investigators don't know if there

was a malfunction or something more sinister like an act of terrorism They

should fill in some gaps

Using radar and satellite data, investigators reconstruct the plane's

flight path after contact was lost.

It's making a left turn. Now it's making a right turn.

They're dropping altitude fast.

After a sudden left turn, Flight 804 spirals downwards until it hits the sea.

If you have a problem, You want to get towards an airport so you would not want

to circle on your way down.

Maybe there's problems with the controls?

Maybe.

But he'd have time to tell the ATC.

The spiral flown by Egypt Air Flight 804 raises some troubling questions.

A spiral descent is what will eventually happen to an airplane if it's completely

left alone by the pilots and not controlled by an autopilot. Did

something prevent the pilots from operating the plane's controls?

Investigators hang their hopes on the recovery of the black boxes from the

wreckage.

But what remains of the plane is somewhere 3,000 meters or nearly 10,000

feet underwater.

3,000 meters of water is a very, very challenging environment under immense

pressure. A surface vessel uses hydrophones to scan the sea for a

specific frequency being transmitted or pinged by the black boxes.

If the transmitter is not buried in either wreckage or in the seafloor, you

can pick it up from a pretty good distance out it's a race against time

the pingers on the black boxes only have battery power to transmit for 30 days

look is that it two

weeks into the search investigators track a frequency that matches the

pingers that's gotta be it

The team deploys a remotely operated submarine equipped with cameras and

robotic arms to confirm the find.

Technicians control the submarine through a tether that extends from the

ship.

Okay, it should be right there.

Here's the plane.

They find the wreckage.

but now must locate the flight recorders they're looking for the flight data and

cockpit voice recorders those are our key pieces of evidence in the

investigative process okay slowly slowly i see it

there using the submarine's robotic arms the team extracts the black boxes

These things are gold to an investigator.

And to be able to go down that deep and in those cold, frigid, dark waters and

pick things out selectively, that's magic.

Here's what they found so far.

In Egypt, investigators study the debris field, mapped from underwater footage

analysis.

It looks like a fairly contained area.

It doesn't seem like the plane exploded.

If it came apart mid-air, the debris would be scattered further apart.

The destruction of the plane likely occurred on impact with the water, not

while in the air.

So the plane was intact through a 37,000 feet descent.

That's a long time.

Why didn't the pilots tell the controllers what was going on?

There's a saying in aviation, during an emergency, you need to first aviate, and

then you navigate, and lastly, you communicate.

The cockpit voice recorder should help.

Investigators wonder what was happening in the cockpit of Egypt Air Flight 804

in the minutes before it crashed.

There have been a couple of cases where pilots have deliberately done something

to cause the aircraft to crash and, you know, to achieve their own suicide by

it.

Just ten months earlier, a pilot on a German wings airbus deliberately crashed

into the French Alps, killing 150 people.

But this didn't look like one of those.

It really looked as if the aircraft was out of control.

The question then is...

Why on earth was it from normal, regular flight suddenly out of control?

We've got data.

It's from Egypt Air.

Airbus and Egypt Air provide them with a source of evidence.

What are they saying?

There were a bunch of ACARS messages.

A digital data link system called ACARS sends short messages from the aircraft

to ground stations via satellite.

The ACARS messages are one thing that the investigators will go look at early

because they know the airplane is transmitting. Is there anything unusual

in those transmissions? What's that?

Eleven messages in total.

Egypt Air gives the investigating team a full list of transmissions from Flight

804's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS.

It looks like the first four messages are minor maintenance messages during

engine startup.

But these seven messages occurred within a three-minute time span.

What's that?

The fault messages reveal a crew confronted by a series of warnings three

hours and 17 minutes into the flight.

Anti-ice right window.

It starts on the right side of the plane with the right window anti-ice system.

What's going on over there?

I don't see anything.

Second message is from the right side windows too.

The first two ACARS messages tell investigators there was a problem with

the windshield panels on the right side of the cockpit.

The sensor in the sliding window is primarily to determine the temperature

of the window so that the heating elements can maintain the desired

temperature. Check out this third warning.

Smoke in a lavatory.

There's smoke in the avionics bay as well.

We've got trouble.

Something's wrong.

Critical computers are located in the avionics bay.

Smoke in the avionics bay, that can get you in trouble real quick.

Just two minutes after the smoke warnings, the pilots discover that their

primary flight controls are failing.

We've got an SEC problem.

The SEC computer manages the spoilers and elevators which move up and down to

change the plane's pitch and roll.

If the crew knew this, there is yet another piece of evidence that there's

something seriously wrong in the avionics bay.

If they are losing flight controls, that could explain the slow spiraling

descent.

Let us move to the backup.

The A320 flight control system was designed so that if one system failed,

the backup system would still operate.

If one fails, fails totally, the other system will give them enough control to

get the aircraft back to base.

There aren't any warnings on the other flight control computers.

The ACARS messages tell investigators Flight 804 was in serious trouble in the

final minutes before it crashed.

all pointing to one thing.

There's a fire at the front of the plane.

There's nothing that could happen on an airplane that is more chilling

and more dangerous than fire on board because fires can spread very rapidly

and they can do tremendous damage to control systems.

After analyzing the ACAR's warnings, the investigators grapple with the

devastating implications of the discovery.

Maybe they are too busy fighting the fire to call air traffic control.

You must get the fire out quickly. You just cannot allow it to spread.

Now investigators face more difficult questions.

The investigators want to discover exactly where it started. The whole

reason for the investigation is to prevent this happening again.

All right, let's have a listen.

Investigators turn to the CVR in the hopes it might reveal more about the

fire on board.

Egypt 804, maintain flight level 370 and current heading.

Maintain 3-7-0 and current heading.

The BEA helped the Egyptians by downloading the data, but then the BEA

had to hand the cockpit voice recorder over to the Egyptians.

There's a fire!

The crew's statement of the word fire indicates that they have evidence,

hard evidence,

After listening to the CVR, the Egyptian investigators report their findings to

France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis, or BEA.

Any idea where it started?

I don't know.

No, there's no indications.

Well, we'll have to find out another way.

When are you coming back?

I'm sorry, I need to stay in Cairo.

Why was there a fire?

The crew states the word fire.

Why? Where?

Seven months into the international investigation aided by the BEA, The

Egyptian government suddenly releases a statement to the media.

The Egyptians believe that this was some form of sabotage involving an explosive.

The Egyptian government believes an act of terrorism may have brought down Egypt

Air Flight 804.

By law, the investigation is handed over to Egypt's state prosecutor.

It's out of my hands.

You must understand.

The Egyptian authorities advanced the theory that there was an explosion on

board.

That is certainly something to be considered, but you provide the evidence

for everyone to see.

Can we see your forensic report?

The case is with state investigators now.

I'm sorry.

There's too much room for error here.

Are you sure it's not a false positive?

The tests are conclusive.

The BEA and Airbus tried their best to say, hey, we're here to help, we're here

to help, we're here to help, and they were ignored.

Okay. To say, well, we have evidence and we're not going to discuss it any

further flies in the face of the International Civil Aviation

Organization.

agreements that have been made by countries worldwide.

In Milan, Italy, aviation journalist Leo Berberi follows the case closely.

The Egyptian investigators started talking about an explosion aboard as a

result of a terrorist attack.

And when asked to provide proof, they didn't provide any.

And that was welcomed with a lot of skepticism from the aviation community.

Are there chemical residue that is consistent with an explosive?

If it had been a bomb, nobody claimed responsibility.

That makes the entire exercise of bombing an aircraft pretty damn useless.

Our own forensics are in.

Air accident investigators from France's BEA independently look into the

terrorism theory.

They test materials from the crash for explosive residue.

Negative for traces of explosive.

They can't find any evidence to support the bomb theory.

The information they had denied what the Egyptians were suddenly claiming.

There's got to be a connection here.

Unconvinced by the Egyptian government's bomb theory, BEA investigators hunt for

the source of a fire they're certain ripped through Flight 804.

There's a fire!

The right window heating element is first.

They look for a pattern to the ACAR's messages to explain the cause of the

fire. There has to be something in common.

And that's the big question. What could trigger this?

Then smoke in the lavatory and avionics bay.

It's moving from front to back.

The order matters in that you may be able to say the fire is increasing.

It's also propagating. It's moving. So it's affecting different parts of the

airplane.

The last warning the ACAR system processed had to do with a flight

control problem.

That was a very serious one.

Everything seemed to kind of center in on the avionics compartment.

The avionics bay is packed with wiring.

Maybe some wires arced and ignited.

The A320, like a lot of modern jets, is a fly-by-wire airplane.

the flight control position.

If you were to lose all electricity in the airplane, maintaining control

becomes very, very challenging.

My belief was that this was an avionics bay fire.

The smoke penetrated probably via the floor or the floor panels, penetrated

into the forward lavatory.

Did faulty wiring in the avionics bay ignite a fire on board?

Sounds like Swiss Air 111.

On Swiss Air 111, arcing in the wiring of the plane's entertainment system was

identified as the source of a tragic on-board fire that killed 229 people.

As soon as I heard about the ACAR's messages about smoke in the avionics

bay,

I immediately thought of Swiss Air Triple One.

Did an electrical fire start in the avionics bay on board Egypt Air Flight

804? A fire can happen on board any aircraft.

They can be caused by a variety of things, but very often they're triggered

by some kind of an electrical fault.

If there was faulty wiring on an A320 that crashed into the Mediterranean.

It would have grave repercussions.

If that were the cause, you can inspect the rest of the fleet and make sure that

the same chafing is not happening in the rest of the fleet.

But without the assistance of the Egyptian Civil Aviation Ministry,

there's no way to determine the cause of the fire.

The BEA's investigation stalls due to lack of evidence.

It's really vital to have a final report because that's the only way to improve

aviation, to avoid making the same mistakes.

Six years after the crash of Flight 804, there's still no official report nor

conclusion to Egypt's criminal investigation.

Pronto. In March of 2022, aviation journalist Leo Berberi gets a

huge scoop.

After years that I was harassing people involved directly in the investigation,

someone in France had some news for me about that flight.

I'll meet you there.

Aviation journalist Leo Berberi of Corriere della Sera meets a trusted

source who offers another explanation for the crash of Egypt Air Flight 804.

We met and the person handed me the document.

Berberi learns from the confidential source.

Details of an investigation launched by the French judiciary, staffed with a

team of technical experts, appointed to analyze the available evidence.

The French judiciary involved five experts in aviation and in accidents,

probably some of the best in the world, and handed them all the documents, all

the data they had about that flight.

The aim?

is to determine if the accident constituted involuntary manslaughter.

The French government started the investigation in Paris because there

were French citizens among the victims on that flight.

Berbery confirms the report with the French judicial investigation, who had

secured copies of the cockpit voice recorder.

All we were told is the pilots reported a fire but didn't mention its location.

Let's see what they said.

The investigators began their analysis by looking for answers to the main

question. How did a fire start on Flight 804?

We had a lot of questions, a lot of theories, but no answers.

The word fire that is on the voice recorder indicates this was something

other than an explosion.

Tired?

I'm okay.

Stop.

Do you hear that?

Play it again.

Tired?

I'm okay.

Looks like there's something on channel 3.

Can you isolate it?

Visually?

The cockpit voice recorders not only can record voices, but they record noises in

the cockpit, which can tell us another story too.

Investigators isolate the channels.

On one of the channels, they hear something unusual.

What's that sound?

They worked on that audio, changing the sound spectrum to reduce the low

frequencies. This could allow them to hear clearly something coming from

one of the microphones of the pilots.

It's like whispering sound.

Can you pull the library of sounds?

Investigators compare the sound to similar sounds in a database of cockpit

noises.

Not this one.

Not that one either.

Play that one.

No, that's not it. What about this one?

That's it.

It's the oxygen mask.

Was oxygen leaking from a mask in the cockpit?

Says here that if not stowed properly, it's going to leak.

Now the closest oxygen master channel 3 is this one.

Right behind first officer's seat.

Hello, hello.

Egypt Air 804.

Flight level 370, squawk number 7624.

The implication of the discovery is immediately clear.

That's fuel for the fire.

In an oxygen-enriched environment, the potential for ignition goes up and the

severity of the ensuing fire post-ignition goes up.

An oxygen leak can feed a fire, but it can't ignite one.

Investigators wonder what could have started the fire. I need reports from

cases with in-flight fires.

Are there other cases where a similar fire brought a plane down?

One of the early things you do is, has the fleet seen this before or anything

similar to it? Have there been flight deck fires?

And there have.

In June 1983, an onboard fire ripped through an Air Canada DC-9 and forced

the pilots to make a harrowing emergency landing.

American investigators theorized that a lit cigarette in the lavatory was one of

the possible causes.

Perhaps the pilots were smoking.

Smoking regulations for pilots in Egypt? What are they?

Smoking has been banned on most airliners around the world for years.

Unbelievable.

Egypt Air did not allow smoking on board, except in the cockpit.

It was allowed in 2016 to smoke in the Egypt Air's cockpit with the

authorization of the captain.

With no ban on smoking for pilots at Egypt Air in 2016, French judicial

investigators put forth a theory that focuses on the pilots of Flight 804.

The Egyptian

Pilots Association insists that the pilots were not smokers.

According to the Egyptian authorities and the Egyptian media, the pilots

weren't smokers. But according to other pilots that I interviewed, they were

smokers.

Studying maintenance reports for the aircraft, investigators make an

important discovery.

It's not just the ashtrays that were changed.

They replaced the FO's oxygen mask.

And it looks like it was left in emergency mode.

This is just what we need.

The first officer's oxygen mask was changed three days before the accident.

According to the experts, the oxygen mask was set improperly on an emergency

mode. When an oxygen mask is left in emergency mode, it feeds oxygen at a

higher pressure, releasing more oxygen than when it's in normal mode.

I can see where it could, depending on the position, initiate...

flow out of the hose into the mask and then into the environment.

Aren't the pilots supposed to check the oxygen masks at the start of each day?

Pilots are supposed to check that setting unless someone else on the first

flight of that day has already done that. But that doesn't mean that you can

do that again.

french judicial investigators speculate that the leaking oxygen saturated the

cockpit air increasing the potential for a sudden fire

the french report concluded that the aircraft

went down because there was something most probably a cigarette that with the

contribution of the oxygen leaking from the first officer's mask started a fire

that wasn't stopped or couldn't be stopped leo berberi breaks the story

that the french judicial inquiry has a very different theory from either the

egyptian government or france's bureau of investigation and analysis for civil

aviation safety it's a theory question by many experts Just imagining that this

mask is filling the cockpit with a high percentage of oxygen is ridiculous

because the feed, even when it's at full blast, is intended to be enough feed to

the pilot's face like this in the cockpit. That would have been minimal.

Let's move to the backup.

To me, frankly, this is a bit of a stretch.

Officially, the ignition source for the onboard fire remains an open question.

Families of those lost in the tragedy still have no firm answers.

The Egyptians maintained that this was an act of terrorism.

Two alternate explanations remain on the table. The cigarette theory,

And the faulty wiring theory.

What caused Flight 804 to crash remains a mystery.

But one fact is clear.

Whatever happened could happen again.

It's absolutely vital that we find out what caused the fire on this airplane.

Aviation does not do well with mysteries.

We never have.

The Egyptian government has since banned smoking in the cockpit.

As of 2022, there still isn't an official report.

I think we know that there's a lot more information that has been gathered about

Flight 804 than has been released.

An incomplete investigation leaves behind an incomplete story.

Multiple unanswered questions tarnish the case.

What's that?

But there's agreement that the crisis began suddenly, escalated rapidly, and

forced the pilots to act fast.

While the plane is cruising at 37,000 feet, first signs of a crisis become

apparent. Things had started going wrong.

There's a fire!

You need to get the airplane on the ground now.

Too many things are failing. Too many warnings are coming up.

It's spreading. Where's it coming from? I don't know.

The warnings would have spurred the pilots into action, but the situation

worsened.

It's getting increasingly smoky. They're going to be increasingly having trouble

with breathing.

Blower override.

Cabin fans off.

the pilots would have followed the procedures for smoke in the cockpit in

an attempt to isolate the source of the smoke.

The electrical emergency configuration would have shut

down most of the aircraft's systems, leaving the pilots with only some basic

controls to bring the plane down.

uh safeguard in airliners for quite a long time it

seems the fire grew i'm taking us down and

spread into the passenger cabin

there is a fire extinguisher in the flight deck so

Where's the fire? What's the intensity of the fire? Where's it progressing?

Every second the fire burns, the more damage the plane sustains.

The situation in the flight deck would be chaos because

it's becoming increasingly difficult for the pilots to know what

they are fighting against. I can't see!

The cockpit of Flight 804 was likely engulfed in flames as the pilots tried

to save their plane.

How exactly the pilots tried to fight back the fire is another one of Flight

804's unsolved mysteries.

If nobody knows about what went wrong in a particular accident, how can they

change their own programs? How can they devise their aircraft better?

If mistakes were made by Egypt Air or by Airbus, they remain unpublicized.

Airbus has not made any changes to the design of the A320 as a result of this

accident. It's been a large number of years since this tragedy happened, and

we still don't know why.

We owe it to the traveling public, we owe it to crew members.

We owe it to the victims' families.