Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804
Comments
ordu
ec109685
Besides not agreeing with the EAAID, nothing in then BEA report makes Egypt look bad. It was a tragic accident and the crew acted admirably.
What was the motivation for Egypt to insist on a bomb detonation beyond them believing that is what happened?
ndiddy
The article and French report point to the fire being caused by an oxygen leak from a faulty cockpit oxygen mask system. There were many problems reported with the system on that plane, such as the oxygen air level decreasing every flight and the oxygen mask box being replaced with a refurbed faulty one from another plane after it was found to be stuck open. Additionally, there's allegations of other problems with the plane in question not being logged properly. I think having a plane full of passengers on the state-run Egyptian airline getting killed due to poor maintenance is enough of a motivation for the Egyptian government to try to cover things up.
singleshot_
If an airline discovers that it has poor maintenance from an accident investigation, and tells everyone about the problem, then I _might_ consider flying that airline in the furure.
EgyptAir would be an extremely hard no for me.
unyttigfjelltol
I assumed the lavatory alarm sent the Egyptian commission irretrievably down the wrong investigatory path, and couldn't be pulled back.
That said, answering your question, an alternative interpretation would read quite a lot of missing context from the pilot's final words on the CVR:
> For several seconds, the weak sound of breathing continued, followed by the thud of an object falling to the floor. And then, uttering the last words of flight 804, words heard by no one save for that lonely sentinel, the CVR, he said, “[I] ask forgiveness from God.”
elashri
> “[I] ask forgiveness from God.”
That's too much reading by a western observer who doesn't understand the religious and cultural aspect of things. This could mean anything from "hoping that God will help us in this difficult situation by admitting your sins" to someone who realizes it is almost the end and as someone who believes in after death then they want to ask forgiveness in the last moments.
selimthegrim
The last part of the sentence is correct, but the EgyptAir 990 crash gave it a bad cast in Western eyes.
gus_massa
Hi from Argentina! Am I Westener enough?
I think I don't have enough cultural and religious context, but they look like standard last words to say. (Moreover, they feel like last words indicate that the whole crew and passengers were unrelate for the cause of the accident, but perhaps I'm reading too much.)
qingcharles
This is wild to me:
"Even though passengers have been forbidden from smoking on airplanes for 25 years, the rules about smoking in the cockpit are less straightforward, and international regulations appear to invest the captain with the authority to decide whether smoking will be allowed or not."eddywebs
Sounds like rule made by smoking captains for the smoking captains.
lazide
It’s good to be the king?
eadmund
Why is it surprising? There’s no danger from smoking on-board; banning it was never about safety.
wat10000
You just read about dozens of people being killed by an on-board fire and you’re going to say there’s no danger from casually having a fire on the end of a stick? Even if this one wasn’t started by a cigarette, they certainly can cause fires.
qingcharles
Smoking on flights sucked. The whole cabin ended up hazy and choked with smoke. It stank. I hated those little ashtrays full of nasty ash and gum in the armrests. There are more than just the obvious safety reasons to ban it.
varelse
[dead]
protimewaster
It feels pretty obvious that discouraging fire in a fully enclosed space would have safety as a motivating factor, so I'm surprised that multiple people here are arguing that there's no safety component.
Rebelgecko
It seems like the corrective action was just to add ash trays? Interesting how the pilot later disappeared without a trace tho
NBJack
You've got multiple sources of pure oxygen on board, and potentially hundreds of passengers counting on a safe flight in a metal tube hurling through the sky thousands of feet off the ground at hundreds of miles an hour.
PanMan
There is a danger, but not a direct danger (of the plane crashing). It certainly isn't healthy :)
inglor_cz
On a somewhat related note, Egyptian science tends to suffer from a massive scientific misconduct (fraud) problem - see for example this paper by Egyptian authors, which covers the medical field:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.20.23286195v...
Maybe the attitude towards "truth vs. face" is similar in Egyptian governmental institutions.
Egypt in general is a low-trust society, scoring lower than India or Russia, though not much lower than usual in Africa.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/iab8r7/social_trus...
This indicates that lived experience of the Egyptians themselves, when it comes to trusting others, is somewhat bad.
aprilthird2021
Of course it is, it's a brutal military dictatorship where the last (and only) democratically elected leader was overthrown by the army and died in prison.
Those kinds of systems, where people are convinced their opinions and convictions don't matter, lead to problems like this
dash2
This might get the causality backward. Most high trust societies were high trust before, not after, they became democracies.
aprilthird2021
I think most democracies were founded as such and so the society and democracy were born at the same time
inglor_cz
Nope, democracies are usually much younger than the underlying societies.
For example, the vast majority of Europe is now democratic. 200 years ago, most of Europe was autocratic and even exceptions like the UK were at most very incomplete democracies with limited suffrage.
But the constituent nations and ethnicities are very much the same, even though political boundaries have shifted; an English, Polish or Spanish person can read 200 year old texts without much effort. There wasn't any seismic shift comparable to the collapse of the Roman world and the subsequent rearrangement of nations and ethnicities across the continent. Krakow is still Polish, Budapest is still Hungarian and Milan is still Italian.
Only in a few places like Breslau/Wroclaw there was a meaningful population shift.
aprilthird2021
But most democratic countries in the world are not in Europe. Most of them were born as democracies: India, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, USA, etc.
eadmund
> Maybe the attitude towards "truth vs. face" is similar in Egyptian governmental institutions.
My initial instinct when reading the prologue was to think about that, and be proud that we’re not like that. But then I reflected a bit more, and wondered. When folks say something we dislike, do we consider that it may be true, or do we shut down the conversation?
I’m reminded of the response to any number of public controversies in my lifetime, when unpopular arguments did not result in compelling counter-arguments but instead in shout-downs.
inglor_cz
This is a good observation, but as usual, everything comes in degrees of severity.
To fabricate an implausible report about a plane crash which took more than 60 lives is a very deep institutional problem, let us hope that this won't become the planetary norm.
aprilthird2021
It's actually a shallow institutional problem. If the dictator wants the report to say one thing, it must, the end.
userbinator
In all tests, the fire, propelled by the oxygen leak, produced a terrifying “blowtorch” effect, and the flames were literally white-hot.
Sufficient concentrations of oxygen can cause even steel to burn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lance
There must be a reason they use pure oxygen, as regular compressed air, also breathable, would not have the same intense reactivity.
tgsovlerkhgsel
If you put a human in an environment with 20% of sea level pressure, and feed them 20% sea level pressure air, they will suffocate.
If you were to somehow feed them 100% sea level pressure air through a perfectly sealed mask, they will be unable to exhale and/or get some kind of fatal side effects (burst lungs or air bubbles making it into the blood stream). So you have to feed the breathing gas at the surrounding pressure.
If, however, you give them 100% oxygen at 20% sea level pressure, they will be able to happily breathe it as if it was regular air with 20% oxygen near sea level, at least until you introduce an ignition source. What matters physiologically is the partial pressure (pressure multiplied by fraction).
(Likewise, if you give someone 100% oxygen at sea level pressure for a short time, they'll be fine. Do the same at more than twice sea level pressure, e.g. while diving, and the oxygen becomes fatally toxic.)
wat10000
Incidentally, it is possible to provide the breathing gas at somewhat over the ambient pressure. This can allow survival without cabin pressurization at altitudes above the point where even 100% oxygen wouldn’t be sufficient. But the pressures that can be used are well below what you’d need for normal air to be sufficient at a typical airliner cruising altitude.
dreamcompiler
> Sufficient concentrations of oxygen can cause even steel to burn
Not just thermal lances; oxy-acetylene cutting torches work by burning through steel, and you can buy one for not much money at almost any hardware store.
masklinn
> There must be a reason they use pure oxygen, as regular compressed air, also breathable, would not have the same intense reactivity.
Pure oxygen at 1/5th standard pressure has the same effect as air at standard pressure, and assuming nitrogen and oxygen compress similarly you can either fit 5 times more in the same canister, or you can have a canister 1/5th the size and weight.
wezdog1
It's used due to the low partial pressure of oxygen at high altitudes
soapboxrocket
Reminds me a bit of the UPS Flight 6 that crashed in 2010. Wasn't the cause of the fire, but the fire heated up the co-pilots oxygen system to the point he couldn't wear it and eventually succumbed to smoke hypoxia. Due to smoke in the cabin the pilot couldn't see his flight deck readouts or out the window and eventually crashed into the ground.
veeti
From the same author: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/alone-in-the-inferno-the...
ddalex
One would have to wonder why an emergency smoke extractor fan isn't default equipment - when pilots oxy is deployed a panel should blow outward and a high flow fan start.
sterlind
blowtorch effect. depressurizing the cabin and cargo hold is on the checklist for some on-board fires, but the rushing air can produce a blowtorch and spread the fire along. see UPS flight 6 iirc.
dmckeon
Tragedy from a Swiss cheese failure - several small holes/failures all line up. The issue of halon extinguishers versus oxygen-powered combustion producing many toxins while failing to extinguish is interesting - good that:
> Halon fire extinguishers are scheduled to be phased out of most commercial aircraft by the end of 2025.
wk_end
In commercial aviation the vast majority of tragedies are Swiss cheese failures, at this point. The system has worked very hard to optimize out the possibility of any one individual failure leading to catastrophe. But the explosion of potential combinations - along with the extremely low odds of them ever occurring - makes preparing for one of them much less feasible.
FridayoLeary
I'm surprised that a catastrophic runaway oxygen leak is possible on an aircraft in todays day and age. Aircraft design is dominated by strict safety regimes that take into account even far fetched scenarios. Putting one valve in the rubber hose sounds sub optimal. Gas station pumps, for example have a valve that closes if the hose gets torn away. (which does happen when people forget about the pump and drive off). From the article it sounds like a button closes the oxygen tank but a pilot sitting next to a flamethrower might not remember to press it. One obvious solution is that the oxygen tank should be activated only in an emergency instead of being on by default during the flight but i assume the current procedure exists for a reason.
wat10000
The article says that a risk analysis was done for the system and the risk was found to be “extremely improbable,” meaning between 1 in 100 million to 1 in a billion flight hours.
This flight may have been extremely unlucky, or the risk analysis may have been wrong. This is why the behavior of the Egyptian authorities is so frustrating; the purpose of the accident investigation is to see if there are problems that should be addressed.
CamperBob2
Also, even if the risk analysis was right, it didn't justify an "extremely improbable" conclusion. If the global airline industry operates a total of about 50 million flights per year, and the average duration is about 2 hours, then we stand a good chance of seeing an accident like this every few years.
wat10000
Reading up a little on the regulations, the FAA defines “extremely improbable” as less than one in a billion per hour, with the goal that a given type of airplane should be unlikely to ever experience a catastrophic failure during its service life.
Of course, there’s more than one type of airplane in the world, so you do have to wonder if that standard is adequate. I didn’t see how they quantify “unlikely,” but if it’s, say, 1 in 10 then the wide range of aircraft types means many of them will experience a catastrophic failure.
I’d expect this stuff to be gradually tightened. The current standard would have been ridiculous and unobtainable some decades ago. As technology and experience advances, there should be room to improve it further.
masklinn
The rarity of such events (as outlined by TFA) is probably a major reason, even more so as they seem to generally be caused more by maintenance and from places with less than stellar incident reporting.
While there is some amount of proactivity in aircraft safety I'm not sure there are people with enough free time that they can make up failure modes or trawl through every minor incident report until (again as in the case of TFA) prompted by an actual failure, unless one of the minor incidents is itself proactively raised as a major risk avoided by blind luck.
userbinator
instead of being on by default during the flight but i assume the current procedure exists for a reason.
Suppose it fails the other way --- pilot needs oxygen but the valve refuses to open. I think they definitely did a risk analysis and came up with the current design, reasoning that the increased risk of an oxygen fire would be less than the risk of a pilot suffocating if the system failed the other way.
cyberax
This really is a non-issue. If you're at the point where toxins from halon pyrolysis are a problem, then you're likely already dead from other factors (heat, smoke, etc.).
Halon can works even at concentrations of just 2-5% by volume. This is entirely safe to breathe for humans. There's a video of a person discharging a halon extinguisher in a room, and then proceeding to try to light a cigarette. The matches go out immediately after striking the matchbox and the lighter can't even ignite.
CO2 extinguishers are really worse, they need to displace most of the oxygen to be effective. Unfortunately, humans also need this oxygen.
In addition, CO2 stream can cool the burning material, but it can also spread it (so be careful if you use it on burning liquids).
buildsjets
In testing aircraft installations, the FAA requires you to demonstrate 6% concentration of Halon 1301 at 12 FAA chosen locations in a compartment for 0.5 seconds, simultaneously, when the test is run at sea level and standard temperature. This is to allow for the fact that the halon bottles may be cold soaked down to -60F and that the system needs to be effective at density altitudes down to -1000 feet.
jabl
Engine rooms in ships typically have CO2 systems. There's been several fatalities when crew have reentered the space before the CO2 has been ventilated away. Made worse by CO2 being heavier than air so it can remain in some crawlspace under the engine frame or such.
cyberax
Yep. Found that safety video: https://youtu.be/NrP5-E9jmas?t=344 - I was misremembering it a bit.
It's really unfortunate that halon is so dangerous for the ozone layer, none of the replacements are as good as it was.
jabl
High-pressure water mist systems seem pretty good, including being usable in spaces with lots of electrical stuff like machine rooms and data centers.
cyberax
Second 292 for the demo.
buildsjets
No, they are not. Source: me. Also here’s the applicable EU regulation. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... Only handheld portable extinguishers are required to be phased out in 2025, and only in locations that are regulated by EASA. The FAA does not give a rip, and neither to the many regulatory bodies around he world who defer tho the FAA. I don’t know what the CAAC is doing. As far as the FAA concerned, compliance with the Montreal Treaty is the Department of State’s problem. Btw, since there is only one company that has certified a non-halon (2-BTP) handheld, they have jacked the retail/list price up to $2630 compared to an equivalent sized Halon 1211 handheld for $475.
Did you know that in the wrong circumstance a 2-BTP extinguisher will feed a fire rather than extinguish it? It’s a phenomenon called subinerting. One manufacturer blew up an FAA lab pretty badly while testing 2-BTP. Here’s a report on the earth-shattering kaboom. I only got to see he wreckage a few weeks later. https://www.nist.gov/publications/chemical-kinetic-mechanism...
Permanently installed Halon firex systems in commercial aircraft will not be phased out until 2040. I have been working, as a part of larger team, to certify a non-halon based firex in cargo and engine compartments for many many years now. It's been slow going. All commercial aircraft from all manufacturers still use Halon for their permanently installed firex and will continue to do so for the near future. We have put non-halon systems into some military aircraft that go thru a commercial certification, for example the KC46 tanker, but there are some good reasons it would not be the best choice for an actual commercial aircraft. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/740629/kc-46...
If anyone actually gave a rip about ozone depletion, they would ground the F-16 fighter. The F-16 inerts it’s fuel tank ullage space with Halon. Every F-16 flight is a direct injection of pure Halon straight into the stratosphere. Mainline that stuff, feels so good. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1981-1638
thedrbrian
>The F-16 inerts it’s fuel tank ullage space with Halon.
why can't they use nitrogen ?
buildsjets
Weight, and the small size of the aircraft. F-16s are tiny. It would take a LOT more stored nitrogen gas to dilute the O2 level below the upper explosive limit, than it takes of CF3Br to chemically interfere with combustion. Modern aircraft use continuous nitrogen gas separators that run off engine bleed air to accomplish the task, at the cost of some weight and a ~3-5% increase in fuel burn. There was a study to replace the CF3Br with CF3I back in the 1980s but it was shelved due to technical challenges, which could have been overcome with additional investment.
https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/el/fire_research...
sgerenser
Thanks for the real world information! Username checks out.
wkat4242
That's more because of the ozone layer.
While it's not good to use halon in a semi contained space like an airplane, it is incredibly effective at killing fire. It really sucks the heat out of it. Thus in most cases the fire is killed quickly and not much toxins are produced. This is important too because fire itself produces a lot of lethal toxins too, most people in a fire don't burn to death but get poisoned by the smoke.
So it's a big loss imo. I understand why because it's one of the most potent ozone layer killers. But still.. you're not using the stuff unless you have no other choice. If you're not using it it doesn't end up in the environment.
In this case it didn't work because the cargo bay in question was not fitted with extinguishers if I remember correctly.
bitwalker
> It really sucks the heat out of it.
One of the problems with halon, and the write-up mentions this, is that it is super effective at starving the fire of oxygen, but has zero effect on the heat of the fuel that was burning. So the fire goes out, but if oxygen is reintroduced before the fuel has a chance to cool sufficiently, it reignites - and now not only are you back where you started, but you have all the toxic byproducts that burning halon produces, which will kill you in a hurry if you breathe them in.
cyberax
> One of the problems with halon, and the write-up mentions this, is that it is super effective at starving the fire of oxygen
That's not actually quite how it works. But yes, the end result is the same. I'll copy-paste my comment from the Medium:
That's NOT how halon works! It's a common misconception, but it's incorrect. In fact, halon doesn't react with pretty much anything, it's very chemically stable. You can mix halon with pure oxygen and it'll just sit there, doing nothing.
This stability is exactly why it works so well. You need only a few _percent_ of halon by volume to stop the fires, not even close to consuming even a fraction of the 21% of oxygen.
Normal oxygen consists of two atoms bonded together (thus "O2"). And fire is spread by oxygen radicals, lone oxygen atoms that have an unpaired electron, eager to make bonds. In a fire, an oxygen radical reacts with a molecule of fuel, and this reaction produces enough energy to create at least one more oxygen radical, sustaining the chain reaction.
But halon has these chlorine and bromine atoms, they are bound tightly to carbon, but not as tightly as oxygen would be. So oxygen radicals have enough energy to displace them and bind to the central carbon atom. But the resulting energy release is not enough to create _more_ radicals, so the chain reaction is stopped.
Moreover, the chlorine radical can then snap back onto another carbon atom (from the fuel source), releasing a bit of energy, but not enough to create a new oxygen radical. And the cycle can repeat again.
kergonath
> That's not actually quite how it works.
What you wrote is not contradicting the parent, who just said that it was “super effective at starving the fire of oxygen”. You just described the mechanism. You also contradict yourself by first saying that halon is inert, and then that it neutralises oxide ions by swapping halogens, which is the opposite of non-reactive. The effect of that is that it immobilises reactive oxygen before it oxidises the fuel. And it indeed does nothing to decrease the temperature, which does mean that the fire restarts as soon as oxygen is re-introduced. I know you’re not wrong, but the delivery could be improved.
Anyway, you can elaborate and provide information without disagreeing with the comment you’re replying to. It’s fine, and often informative.
cyberax
Typically, "starving of oxygen" means that there's not enough oxygen around anymore. That's how CO2 extinguishers work, for example. They literally remove enough of the oxygen to make the combustion stop.
Halon does NOT remove the oxygen, there's always plenty of it available. Instead, it stops the chain reaction.
> You also contradict yourself by first saying that halon is inert, and then that it neutralises oxide ions by swapping halogens, which is the opposite of non-reactive.
As I said, you can mix halon and oxygen, and they won't react (even if you try to ignite them). Halon is very unreactive, but it's obviously not _totally_ inert like helium.
userbinator
As I said, you can mix halon and oxygen, and they won't react (even if you try to ignite them).
That makes me wonder if any of the original designers of the oxygen system considered whether a halon-oxygen mix would've been better than pure oxygen.
cyberax
Not really. Adding oxygen for sure won't help. Also halon is stored in extinguishers as a pressurized liquid, not gas.
wkat4242
As far as I understood it reduces temperature also because it boils so easily (very low boiling point). That pulls energy from the fuel. As well as capturing oxygen.
This is why it was used as a refrigerant also.
Also if the fuel is below the auto ignition temperature but above flashpoint it would need another spark to re-ignite.
mmooss
Does anyone know the author's background? All I see is 'analyzer of plane crashes'.
buildbot
She is I believe a pilot, and has been doing this for years and years on (originally?) reddit, in great depth and detail. She also has a really fun podcast with two other people called controlled pod into terrain.
kergonath
I am not sure about her formal credentials, but she’s doing a very thorough job. I could not find a flaw in her explanations involving my field (materials science broadly, and failure mechanics in particular), which is more than I can say of the vast majority of people writing on STEM subjects. I don’t think she has any formal training in the field, but she seems to be talking to the right experts and extracting the right information.
I believe she used to be a pilot.
sofixa
She's one of the best, extremely thorough, and works as a researcher for another very good air crash investigator, Mentour Pilot (YouTube channel).
efitz
Do you see something in the article that should require credentialing to state?
stall84
This had all the tone from the outset to just be narrowly focussed on this crash-investigation alone, but the writer did dedicate a paragraph to Egyptair Flight 990 from 1999.. An incident that really was one of the first modern airline pilot-suicide's that has never (The NTSB's conclusion) been agreed upon by Egypt. And in the past couple of decades that number has risen at an alarming pace (LAM Mozambique Flight 470 2013, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 2014, Germanwings Flight 9525 2015) < That extremely frightening and tight grouping of incidents seems to have been followed by a few years of normalcy. Then most recently the China Eastern Flight 5735 that China is still apparently working on a report for, but don't expect much in the way of admission on China's part, of course. But at any rate, there is a noticeable problem in the corps of pilots being selected to fly for several airlines, even really good airlines.
robocat
Suicide is more common than we measure and can be impetuous:
Three days after a publicized suicide, automobile fatalities increase by 31%. The more the suicide is publicized, the more the automobile fatalies increase. The age of the drivers is significantly correlated with the age of the person described in the suicide story. Single-car accidents increase more than other types just after the publicized suicide.
coredog64
For political reasons SilkAir 185 was ruled inconclusive, but it was almost certainly pilot suicide. Similar to the earlier Egyptair case, the Indonesian authorities were very hostile to the evidence that pointed in that direction.
gus_massa
Why do they use pure oxygen tanks? Isn't it possible to use a mix of oxygen and nitrogen? Doesn't divers use a mix?
croemer
At high altitudes you need pure oxygen to get appropriate partial pressure of oxygen.
amelius
With all the high speed trains in Europe, I'm wondering why we don't see more security around them. It seems a much easier target than airplanes.
wat10000
This story is a good example of one major reason: trains are way more robust. Imagine a similar catastrophic fire in the cockpit of a high speed train. Worst case, you hit the emergency stop and then evacuate the train. The only person who would be at risk would be the train driver. Have that fire in an airplane and everyone on board dies.
This incident wasn't a terrorist attack, but the same idea applies there. The Lockerbie bomb, for example, was pretty small. Setting it off in a train might have killed some nearby people, but that’s all. But set it off in an airplane and you can kill hundreds.
masklinn
> Worst case, you hit the emergency stop
You don't even need to do that, because most trains and pretty much every high-speed train has some sort of dead man's switch, so the driver leaving their seat would automatically enable emergency brake in short order as they would if the driver had e.g. fallen unconscious.
tgsovlerkhgsel
You can (usually) stop a train within less than a minute and then trivially evacuate it.
They're also less dense than most other public transport, including planes.
And it's impossible to add security to local transit, because standing for 15 minutes at a security checkpoint for a 15 minute bus ride will make everyone get a car and/or unelect the idiot who implemented that rule.
happosai
Because security at airports is mostly security theater to make passengers feel safe.
People are generally not afraid of terrorists hijacking or bombing trains, so security theater isn't necessary there.
Bruce Schneier book "beyond fear" is over 20 years old and not outdated a bit.
WeylandYutani
The easiest target is plowing into a crowd with a car. Learning how to drive train is beyond the unhinged morons.
fransje26
And what do you want to do with a high speed train?
They are equipped with a dead man switch, and will shutdown pretty much immediately if not responded to in time. Case in point: the high speed train driver that committed suicide by jumping out of his train two days ago. (May he rest in peace.) And ultimately, they are computer monitored, and will be shutdown if a given set of security procedures are not respected.
French trains have had bombs explode in them in the past, and did not derail. Some have hit landslides at full speed, and did not derail.
High-speed trains are fine, no need for airport-like obnoxious levels of "security".
sofixa
There is, in Spain you have mandatory luggage control before boarding high speed trains. I think it was implemented following this massive terrorist attack in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings
amelius
I don't think luggage control will do much. Train tracks are hundreds of kilometers of practically unprotected attack surface.
shepherdjerred
I’m guessing it’s because you can’t fly a train into a building
fragmede
given how long and heavy trains are, and how fast they can go, and the fact that rails aren't straight, sure you can.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-texas-el-paso/news/20... a train crashed into the chamber of commerce building in Pecos Tx 5 days ago.
masklinn
2 dead (both United Pacific employees, I assume train crew) and 3 light injuries from a train crashing into a truck, derailing, and hitting a building I think is pretty good evidence that using a train as your kinetic delivery is not a great way to do terrorism.
shepherdjerred
…yes, but you can’t do this with a train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
fragmede
But you can do all of these:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_...
eddythompson80
In all those examples trains are no different than movie theaters, malls, markets, sport and music events, etc. i.e: just places where large groups of people gather.
kergonath
And all these places are easier targets with more people.
user_7832
Another reason is, security checks are just one part of the whole process involved. A flight with 100 people dying because of a bomb may be more “glamorous” than 200 dead on a train to a terrorist organization.
Also: the actual number of such people/organizations, is, fortunately, extremely low in daily life.
eadmund
> there was no evidence that the pilots of flight 804 smoked during the flight. But even though the BEA found that a cigarette didn’t cause the fire on flight 804 … the BEA recommended that EASA examine these risks and amend regulations as necessary
Smoking had nothing to do with this incident. Their own testing showed that holding a cigarette in the oxygen stream was (surprisingly) not dangerous. The only risk from cigarettes they found was deliberately trying to light oxygen tubing with a cigarette.
And yet, despite a complete lack of both relevance and evidence, they included a recommendation to clamp down on pilot smoking. Anti-smoking is hysteria.
wussboy
This is the second pro smoking post I’ve seen of yours on this thread. A curious stance to take.
Could a cigarette fall into the mask stowage box and rest against the oxygen tube thus creating a fire? Yes, it could. The entire and complete elimination of this risk is simply solved by forbidding the pilots from smoking, which is already forbidden to the entire cabin crew and passengers. What’s the big deal? Who is harmed by not allowing pilots to smoke?
eadmund
> This is the second pro smoking post I’ve seen of yours on this thread. A curious stance to take.
I don’t particularly like cigarettes, but I love tobacco and I absolutely hate the moral panic over it.
> Who is harmed by not allowing pilots to smoke?
The pilots.
ngneer
A rather well-written piece. My takeaway is that the French investigators are pros and the Egyptians are hacks. And that safety culture matters. One must not bend the facts to draw a desired conclusion. One must review the data without bias, or else recuse oneself.
Ozzie_osman
It's easy to say this sitting in the west, especially since Egypt is run by an authoritarian government. I'll point out though that even sans-authoritarianism, there are plenty of examples of Western "investigators" arriving at politicized and often false conclusions with far worse consequences. The history of the CIA/FBI is chock-full of examples. And you don't even have to go that far back or dig that deep... The whole Iraq WMD debacle.
Anyway, not saying the Egyptian investigators were right in this case (it seems clear that they weren't). Or defending authoritarian governments. Just providing an alternative view point, as someone who lived half his life in Egypt and half in the US.
sofixa
It's not the first time Egyptian investigators disregarded reality to keep face:
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-crash-of-egyptair-fl...
eddythompson80
> My takeaway is that the French investigators are pros and the Egyptians are hacks
Describing them as "hacks" is weird. In most dictatorships, the concern is usually "What does the country's leadership want the official story to be" rather than "What actually happened". Take this quote from the article for example
> "In my opinion, the problem with the report is that it appears to treat the findings of the Triple Committee — the group appointed by the public prosecutor’s office — as the unquestioned truth, and fails to push back on any of its assertions, even the ones that they disagreed with. Instead, because the Triple Committee concluded that a bomb in the galley was the cause of the crash, the EAAID bent itself into a pretzel trying to make the evidence fit that theory. Unfortunately, we don’t know why the Triple Committee and the EAAID chose to die on this hill"
EgyptAir is a government owned enterprise. It's managed by the "Ministry of Civil Aviation" who's head is always some general or commander from the Air Force. If the EAAID investigators were allowed to say that there was a "faulty equipment" then a lot of questions would have had to be answered. A lot of questions that have the possibility of embarrassing people all the way up the chain (especially that as mentioned, that particular oxygen mask was reported faulty from another aircraft and removed for maintenance before, and the crew frequently reported that the pilot oxygen supply always decreases on every flight).
Saying "it was terrorists" is something that no one has to feel embarrassed about. In fact in 2016 the Egyptian government were in the midst of a lot of arrests and suspension of most freedoms to "curb terrorist activities". And such thing plays well into that narrative.
Are you an EAAID investigator who wants to say "it was a faulty oxygen mask"? Ok. How do you fancy you, your brother, cousin, and neighbor spending the next 15-30 years in jail pending investigation on conspiracy against the country?
ngneer
You make a valid point. I stand corrected. "Hacks" is not an accurate term, and fails to account for the full circumstance. I was merely appalled at how willing EAAID were to jump to conclusions and twist facts towards a convenient narrative. France is a democracy, and that makes for an unfair comparison between the two agencies. I am sure that even the most intellectually honest individual will choose their own safety if faced with the reality of imprisonment.
nico
> France is a democracy
And even there, sometimes people will get treated like terrorists for saying the wrong political thing
Like it’s been happening for the last year. Including some protests getting outright made illegal
And as you say, even people that care a lot about the truth, will choose something else to protect themselves or their loved ones
brnt
Such are the mechanics of fascist dictatorships. Individuals are in no way empowered to think or act in ways not supporting the Great Leader. You being unsafe is the method of control.
Take care, America.
mlinhares
Please don't put the blame on dictatorships alone, democratic countries do the same all the time. There's multiple cities in the US where the city officials hid the fact their water was contaminated.
llamaimperative
Yeah people dictator-sympathizers seem to think the problem with strongman asshole leaders is that they're meanie heads (something Real Patriots can look past!). But no, it's that they actually yield failure in a society's most basic functions and at every level.
lazide
It often takes a degree of pain unimaginable to people to realize the true consequences of going down this road. Sometimes, that pain is so extreme people can never do it.
See post WW2 Germany, and all the folks who got caught with nazi memorabilia in their attics for decades afterwards.
Ozzie_osman
> In most dictatorships, the concern is usually "What does the country's leadership want the official story to be" rather than "What actually happened".
This also occasionally happens in non-dictatorships, unless you considered George W a dictator when he was deciding to invade Iraq.
Moru
Whataboutism isn't really the answer here. When the population knows this is the way it works and bends themselves like a pretsel to make their government not kill them, it's not good. You can't compare that to a western country, not even the US is that bad.
Dalewyn
>One must not bend the facts to draw a desired conclusion. One must review the data without bias, or else recuse oneself.
There are essentially two ways to solve a mystery:
A) Consider the evidence and draw a conclusion from them.
B) Consider the conclusion and draw the evidences for it.
Neither is the correct methodology, especially when politics, power dynamics, and social justice are involved.
ngneer
With all due respect, (B) is logically unsound in my mind. You may have meant considering the hypotheses, and then using available data and only available data to rule in or rule out certain scenarios. In my mind, based on decades of studying engineering defects and failures, starting with a conclusion is not a way to solve a mystery at all. Rather, it is only a way to convince oneself of a falsehood. To give an example that is familiar to the HN audience, how many times have you had to debug a bug or problem in a complex system that you initially thought was caused by one thing only to discover it was caused by something completely different?
Dalewyn
>With all due respect, (B) is logically unsound in my mind.
That's because you're concerned about finding out what happened. Not everyone thinks like that, namely some (many) are concerned about creating what happened.
ngneer
Very interesting. Thank you for making the distinction explicit and for helping me to understand the other mindset. You are totally right, in that my mindset is closer to a forensics mindset in such instances, trying to get as close as possible to the "truth", so as to avoid future similar defects and improve system reliability. I do agree that some people prefer to manufacture truth. Any advice on how to get along with these?
Dalewyn
Much like how you can't convince a businessman to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it, it's next to impossible to "find out" a mystery if the powers-that-be do not want that and/or want a more desirable-for-them conclusion.
ngneer
I was afraid you were going to say that ;). Thanks for the sage advice. I think that "safety inspector" would not be a good career choice for people like myself, then. Methinks Boeing and OceanGate had been in the news recently with similar safety attitudes. Oh, well. Live and learn.
lazide
Notably, the type of people who do B are extremely dangerous around anything involving engineering, science, etc - anything where reality actually matters.
Because type A people are what are required to actually fix problems, or learn more things.
Type B people exist when those are ‘not desirable’. Which should indeed scare you, if you care about actual reality (or actual reality matters) in that domain.
Moru
Especially when type A people are working in an environment where the leadership with the guns is type B people. Then type A will proactively switch to type B reasoning to stay alive.
synecdoche
Could someone explain when A) it’s not the correct methodology, unless B) is preferable?
B) appears preferable only under duress and then only to the benefit of saving one’s own skin temporarily, however long that may be.
Hilift
Egypt doesn't have an equivalent to the NTSB. There simply isn't enough depth. They established their own agency in 2002, but it is basically a placeholder.
Klathmon
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thxbud
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geocrasher
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PittleyDunkin
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mikestew
I would probably trust them more than some dismissive rando on the Internet.
vkou
When it's not clear whether you should trust someone, you should:
* Get the necessary background education to understand the subject
* Read what they are saying
* Determine the reasons for whether or not it is wholly, partially, or not at all logically and factually consistent
What you probably shouldn't do is shrug your shoulders, and cite a platitude like "Well, experts have been wrong before! I have no idea who we can trust!"
For heavily technical topics, unfortunately, this does require getting tens of thousands of hours of practice in the relevant field, so I can see why it may be less appealing than the lazy alternative.
thomasmg
There are alternatives. I usually use a mix of: (a) what might be the motivation of the person / group to say something. (b) what are the risks of lying, and the consequences. (c) are there other voices and the possible motivation of those etc. (d) can someone verify this at least partially.
PittleyDunkin
I emphatically agree.
marcodiego
Bookmarking this answer. This will be my automated response to the usual disrespectful comments by conspiracists on conclusions achieved by strong specialists.
23B1
Your answer is in fact the lazy one. The topics that are often beset with controversy and conspiracy are heavily technical.
"You should do your own research" is fine when we're talking about the fall of Rome or aliens in space. It is dismissive and arrogant to say it when it comes to things like COVID or airline safety - areas where we must trust experts.
Shrugging your shoulders at experts who lie about those sorts of topics is a reasonable thing to do because those experts often use their position to further their own agenda, like government officials did during the pandemic or in this case like the Egyptians likely did in the 804 case.
If you are truly intelligent then your job is to hold other experts accountable to a high ethical standard in order to earn people's trust – not to look down your nose at people.
lazyasciiart
If you don’t have the background to understand the topic, then you are not an expert and have no obligation to do anything. The fact that the topics are hard to understand does not mean you can skip understanding and go straight to arguing about it.
23B1
> The fact that the topics are hard to understand does not mean you can skip understanding and go straight to arguing about it.
Depends on the topic. If its about, say, policy, then yes, you absolutely can and should. Certainly being informed is important, and expertise lends some additional credibility to your POV, but 'trust the experts' is no panacea.
If we're talking about load bearing structures in the construction of a bridge, you're right! If we're talking about spending tax dollars on the construction of said bridge, you don't need to be an urban planner or a structural engineer to have a legitimate and worthy opinion.
mmooss
Regarding your point, I mostly agree but I think you can add your own research - not necessarily primary source research - as an input.
> "You should do your own research" is fine when we're talking about the fall of Rome or aliens in space. It is dismissive and arrogant to say it when it comes to things like COVID or airline safety - areas where we must trust experts.
On a tangent ... why are the fall of Rome or intelligent extraterrestrial life less in need of expert input than plane crashes or Covid?
23B1
The former are interesting topics to be sure, but have very little to do with with active engagement in modern society.
mmooss
Thanks for clarifying.
IMHO history and the fall of Rome in particular seem among the most valuable topics today!
23B1
You could be right!
> if it was a coverup, then the EAAID gave away its own game by attaching the BEA’s comprehensive findings.
I'd say, that EAAID had written the report in a way to make the coveraup unmistakable. I mean, the reasoning is not just bad, it contradicts to itself in a way, that to my mind one couldn't achieve without a deliberation. So it is possible that EAAID was forced to support the hypothesis but resisted it in the only way it could.