Pilots’ union rejects negligence in EgyptAir crash

The Egyptian pilots’ union denied negligence in a 2016 plane crash that killed 66 people,  on Friday.

Expert findings submitted to the French judiciary suggested that a leaking cockpit oxygen mask and human factors were likely to blame.

EgyptAir flight MS804 vanished from radar screens on its approach to Cairo from Paris on May 19, 2016. Every single person on board died.

Khaled Refat, president of the pilots’ union, said it wants to sue media who reported the “slanderous” accusations, which Egypt has not officially responded to.

The country’s aviation minister had initially said a terrorist attack, rather than lack of maintenance, was more likely to have brought down the plane.

Oxygen leaking from the co-pilot’s emergency oxygen mask “is seen as the decisive element” causing the fire, the five experts wrote in their 134-page report delivered to the Paris court of appeal in March.

Another expert report in June last year suggested three possible causes of the fire, each of them human-linked and including a “high probability of a lit cigarette or a burning cigarette butt in an ashtray”.

The pilots’ union said the crew flying the plane were non-smokers and “among the most qualified.”

The expert report also pointed to a pattern of “unprofessional activity” including listening to music, repeated comings and goings in the cockpit and “lack of attention to the progress of the flight”.

The changing of the box carrying the co-oxygen pilot’s mask three days before the incident, for unclear reasons, was highlighted by two experts summoned by examining judges in Paris in June 2018.

Egyptians made up the majority of those killed in the crash. In addition, fifteen French nationals were killed. EgyptAir should be charged criminally, according to the families’ representatives.