Around 2:00a.m.on October 31, 1999, a giant twin-
engine EgyptAir Boeing 767 aircraft with 217 people
aboard, which had taken off from New York’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport following an event-
less flight from Los Angeles, plunged mysteriously
from 33,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean without
warning to air traffic control and in calm weather. At
daybreak, some debris and human remains were
found floating on the waves while the rest, it turned
out, had settled on the 250-foot-deep ocean floor.
All aboard—one hundred Americans, eighty-nine
Egyptians, twenty-two Canadians, and others of di-
verse citizenship—were killed.
The Investigation and Differing Conclusions There
followed an extensive investigation by the federal
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), as-
sisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
the Boeing Aircraft Company, which built the air-
craft, and Pratt and Whitney, which produced its en-
gines. EgyptAir, the state-owned carrier, and the
Egyptian government launched their own probes,
even though Cairo had initially deferred to Washing-
ton in spearheading the inquiry, an option Egypt
had since Flight 990 had crashed in international
waters and the Egyptians, some five thousand miles
away, did not have the resources for the job.
In its final report of March, 2002, the NTSB—
stressing the evidence from the plane’s “black
boxes” (the cockpit voice recorder and the instru-
ment monitor), and after two years of intensive tests
of the aircraft (many of them simulated)—found
no physical malfunction whatsoever. Hence, the
board concluded that pilot intervention was the
cause of the crash. The report focused on the fact
that while EgyptAir captain Ahmed el-Habashi was inThe Nineties in America EgyptAir Flight 990 crash 291
U.S. and Egyptian officials hold the flight data recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on October 31,
1999.(AP/Wide World Photos)