Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804(admiralcloudberg.medium.com) |
Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804(admiralcloudberg.medium.com) |
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.
What was the motivation for Egypt to insist on a bomb detonation beyond them believing that is what happened?
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.”
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.
Those kinds of systems, where people are convinced their opinions and convictions don't matter, lead to problems like this
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.
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.
"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."Yes, it was about safety.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> Halon fire extinguishers are scheduled to be phased out of most commercial aircraft by the end of 2025.
I believe she used to be a pilot.
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.
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?
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.
EgyptAir would be an extremely hard no for me.
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).
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
why can't they use nitrogen ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also: the actual number of such people/organizations, is, fortunately, extremely low in daily life.
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".
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.
BEA and the NTSB really really cannot be compared to CIA/FBI/DGSE. They are professionals with clear and apolitical goals. See the NTSB and BEA regularly criticising various government agencies, including in this case BEA being raided by the transport gendermes. Hell, even the MAK (equivalent air crash investigation agency for most of the former Soviet Union) dares criticise and publicly shit on and get into disputes with on government agencies not doing their job.
It's the Egyptians who are really the counterexample here in being absurdly terrible at their jobs. Wether it's just sheer incompetence, corruption, nepotism, or not wanting to embarrass the regime, we'll never know. Maybe it's a mix of the above. But especially in this crash, there is no reason for them to be so absurdly terrible at their jobs, there is nothing for them to be covering up (unlike the previous crash which was genuinely embarrassing for the country).
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-crash-of-egyptair-fl...
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?
This also occasionally happens in non-dictatorships, unless you considered George W a dictator when he was deciding to invade Iraq.
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.
B) appears preferable only under duress and then only to the benefit of saving one’s own skin temporarily, however long that may be.
https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/el/fire_research...
It's really unfortunate that halon is so dangerous for the ozone layer, none of the replacements are as good as it was.
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.
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.)
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Take care, America.
See post WW2 Germany, and all the folks who got caught with nazi memorabilia in their attics for decades afterwards.
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.
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.