How Smoking In The Cockpit Killed 66 People | Egypt Air 804

This is the story of egypt air flight flight 804, on the 18th of may 2016 an airbus a320 took off from paris’s charles de gaulle airport with 66 with people onboard. The plane took off in the cold night sky and turned towards cairo its final destination, the flight went off without a hitch, through the night the plane went through swiss italian croatian serbian albanian greek and egyptian airspace without a problem. At 11:22 pm UTC the jet entered greek airspace and it was at 37,000 feet. The controllers cleared the jet to fly direct to the waypoint kumbi, which is on the boundary between greek and egyptian airspace. The controller transferred the jet over to egyptian control and once the crew had acknowledged he went about assisting other planes but the jet never replied. The jet was 14.8 nautical miles to the north of KUMBI and the tried hailing them again and still no reply. The controller called up cairo area control to see if they had heard from the jet but weirdly enough they had not as well. The controller now worried tried to hail the plane, and still no reply. Then at 7.1 nm north of kumbi the plane was no longer on the radar screens flight 804 was lost and no one on the ground had any idea why. The controller got on the horn with the greek airforce to let them know that the plane had been lost, then a satellite high above the mediterranean picked up an ELT or emergency locator transmitter signal from flight 804 was picked up. This meant that the plane had hit the water and the salt water had activated the ELT transmitter meaning that the plane had been lost. Within minutes jets and rescue assets from both greece and egypt were on station scouring for survivors that they would never find.

The loss off flight 804 was a perplexing one, there was no mayday call no signs of trouble one moment the plane was fine the next it was hurtling towards the mediterranean sea. The task of recovering what was left of the plane would be no easy feat. The radar track and the ELT gave them a rough idea where the plane would be. But theyd still need to bring in large specilaized ships with powerful sonars to find the wreck. Thus on the 31st of may 2016 the ship the laplace joined the search for flight 804. Once on station they had luck right off of the bat, they found some wreckage and they were almost immediately able to detect the ping from one fo the flight data recorders. The data recorders were salvaged and some debris was brought up and they hoped that whatever brought down this jet was in the pieces that they had.
Right off of the bat they had something to go off some of the pieces that they were pulling up from the bottom of the sea and the parts that they found on the surface were bent and beaten up. Now at this point you maybe saying, well yeah mr mini air crash investigation, youd expect that from a plane that fell into the ocean from 37000 feet. For instance they found a food trolley that was floating in the water, this trolley is built out of composite materials covered in metals. Now this trolley was found to be quote “folded inside out to the extent that it lost its structure” end quote. You wouldnt expect damage like that from a plane hitting the water no matter how fast you come down. Other things that they recovered shone more light on what happened onboard flight 804 in its last seconds,, they found some crew bagged, a head rest some seat covers, a backpack and a whole host of other random items all afflicted by the same thing. Heat. Flight 804 was violently and suddenly overcome by fire. The only question is why?
With the flight data recorder data in tow they could paint a picture of what happened in the last moments of flight 804, from 12:29:26 am to 12:29:45 in under 19 seconds the plane lost 13 computer systems. This included the SEC3, the TCAS, the rudder pedal sensor the FAC2 ,FMGC2 and so on. A lot of these sensors were returning random implausible values before