=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/chronicle/archive/2002/01= /27/MN117204.DTL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday, January 27, 2002 (SF Chronicle) All but forgotten =85 EgyptAir crash record languishing in diplomatic limbo Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer In the early hours of Oct. 31, 1999, during perfect night flying weather, an EgyptAir Boeing 767 bound from New York to Cairo suddenly plunged headfirst into the Atlantic Ocean, for no apparent reason and with no distress calls. In the space of a few horrific, disintegrating minutes, broken pieces of airplane, luggage and people sank into 250 feet of water. And within a year, the investigation into the crash had followed the plane into impenetrable murkiness. The crash, which occurred less than an hour after takeoff and some 60 miles south of Nantucket, killed all 217 people aboard, including 100 Americans. With the Sept. 11 airplane disasters preoccupying the nation, EgyptAir Flight 990 has become the forgotten air crash, the one that is in investigative and diplomatic limbo. Four and a half months after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, relatives of the EgyptAir 990 victims know what the families torn apart on Sept. 11 have been going through -- the sudden loss, the irreparable and searing hurt, the feeling that a monstrous crime has been committed. Yet, unlike the families torn apart by the Sept. 11 attacks, the relativ= es of EgyptAir 990 victims are still waiting for the U.S. government to definitively report the cause of the crash. Nearly everyone who has looked into the crash of EgyptAir 990, with the exception of the Egyptian government, has little doubt about how it happened. Most knowledgeable investigators place the blame squarely on co-pilot Gamil el- Batouty. They say that when he was alone in the cockpit, he intentionally flew the plane into the ocean. THE UNOFFICIAL CULPRIT Within nine months, National Transportation Safety Board investigators reached the unofficial conclusion that el-Batouty was the sole cause of the crash. The cockpit voice recorder showed that as the plane was rapidly heading toward the water, in a nearly vertical plunge, the plane's captain, Ahmed al- Habashy, rushed into the cockpit to ask what was going on. El-Batouty was at the controls. The captain shouted, "Pull with me, pull with me," indicating he was trying to get the plane out of its dive, but el-Batouty was pushing the controls in the opposite direction. In the last two minutes of the flight, el-Batouty calmly repeated the phrase, "I rely on God" 11 times. At 1:50 a.m., the voice recorder tape went dead. Looking into el-Batouty's background, and trying to gauge his frame of mind in the days leading up to the crash, the FBI found that the 59-year-old first officer had been the subject of numerous complaints from female guests and employees at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York, where EgyptAir flight crews rested between flights. FBI agents, according to reports they sent the NTSB, interviewed the hotel's security officers, who said el-Batouty repeatedly exposed himself to women guests and lured "female housekeepers" into his room and tried bribing them with "wine, chocolate or money in exchange for sex." The airline apparently knew what was going on with its co-pilot, and cra= sh investigators speculated that EgyptAir may have been about to fire el-Batouty. EGYPT HAD AN AGENDA The Egyptian government, which owns EgyptAir, was invited into the NTSB investigation. When the Egyptians sent their investigative report to the NTSB in April 2000, they said their overall objective was to "confirm that the first officer did not commit suicide and murder." The Egyptians blamed the crash on mechanical failure. In the same month that the Egyptians were trying to prove mechanical failure, Jim Hall, NTSB chairman at the time, testified before a congressional subcommittee that "we have found no indication of a mechanical or weather- related event that could have caused this crash." The plane's flight path and the way its systems were working, Hall said, "are consistent with a deliberate action on the part of one of the crew members." But the NTSB still has not released its final report. According to Jim Brokaw, an Indiana programmer who is president of the Families of EgyptAir 990, the NTSB is aware that "this is a politically sensitive issue" and is waiting for "a green light" from the White House on when to release the NTSB's final report. At the NTSB, spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz said he did not know when the final report might come out, but conceded that the agency's relationship with the Egyptian government during this investigation has been "difficult." DIPLOMACY VS. DETAILS Atlantic Monthly correspondent William Langewiesche, who wrote an exhaustive piece on EgyptAir 990 for the magazine's November 2001 issue, said that after his investigation, he concluded that in the minds of both governments, "the diplomatic concerns (of this crash)" appear to be more important than the detailed cause of the crash. "Egypt is an important player in our international effort to fight terrorism," Langewiesche, who is also a pilot, told The Chronicle. "This is an accident with no importance to aviation safety because there was nothing wrong with the airplane. Airplane pilots who go berserk is something you cannot guard against. If indeed el-Batouty did this, he's dead. What do we do? Stomp on his grave?" "It's a known fact," said Faith Freeman, a Huntington Beach businesswoma= n, "that my mother made the best tuna salad in the entire world." Freeman is talking about Sheila Jaffee, who was 63 when she was killed in the crash of EgyptAir 990, along with three of her closest friends -- Tobey Seidman, 71; Beverly Grant, 81, and Judy Bowman, 57. The women occasionally took vacations together, and this time they were traveling to Egypt and Israel. The four women had been friends for more than 20 years and played cards almost weekly. Tuna salad was one of the favorites at the card games, along with bagels and lox and chips and salsa. Freeman found out about her mother's death when she and her husband were in New York, looking at Eastern colleges for their daughter. "We were in the hotel, and we woke up around 6 o'clock Sunday morning and turned on CNN," she says. "It was at the end of some story and the guy said, 'and we'll get back to the disappearance of EgyptAir 990,' and I was thinking it can't be. And I thought, 'How many flights are going to Egypt that night?' " Of course, it was 990 and she had to hurriedly get someone to be with her sister, Robin, alone back in California. So they called Max Bowman, whose wife, Judy, was also on the flight. Bowman, who lives not far from the Freemans, said, "The phone rang and it was Scott Freeman and he said, 'Max, the plane went down' and I said, 'Is this a practical joke?' and he said, 'Turn on the TV.' And there it was. I let out a scream and my daughter, who was at the house, said, 'What's wrong?' and I told her and she screamed." SCENE GETS REPEATED A few miles down the Orange County coast, the scene was repeated at the home of Randy and Alexa Garell, Beverly Grant's daughter. Randy Garell, speaking for his family, says, "We are the people who were left behind. It doesn't ever go away. People don't realize the details of it. I spent two hours on the phone with the medical examiner in Rhode Island -- telling them this is where Beverly had scars on her body. "She had a pacemaker, and then I had to get the serial number of the pacemaker and they found it, and even returned it to the company that made it. The whole scenario of this is beyond what most people can believe." Gail Seidman, the daughter of Tobey Seidman, believes it all too well. "With the World Trade Center crashes," she said the other day, "the whole world is experiencing a little of what we went through. In a way, it's a validation of our feelings of what it was like to have loved ones murdered in a suicide crash. I don't know how long it takes to heal or if you ever heal. And every time there's a plane crash, it just brings it back." Seidman, a 47-year-old structural engineer who lives in Vallejo, is talking about her mother and weeping. "I asked her, 'Please don't go.' She said, 'No, I'll go. You have to do what you have to do.' " SEEKING CLOSURE A few weeks ago, Seidman drove to a mortuary in Walnut Creek to do something she'd been hesitating to do. She walked into the lobby of Oakmont Memorial Park and Mortuary and said to the woman at the switchboard, "I'm Gail Seidman. I'm here to pick up Tobey Seidman." The mortuary director brought an urn containing skull fragments of Tobey Seidman, verified by DNA comparison. Seidman wept. Then, between the tears, she said, "The Rhode Island medical examiner identified the remains. When I got the call, it put a finality to it. Nothing is going to bring my mother back." In October 2000, Seidman was one of 500 people who gathered at Brenton Point State Park near Newport, R.I., to dedicate a monument to the people who died on EgyptAir 990. "I can't tell you how I felt when I saw el-Batouty's name on the monument," she says. "I spat on it." E-mail Michael Taylor at mtaylor@sfchronicle.com.=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002 SF Chronicle