A Far-Reaching Inquiry

Staggering but true: The third major airline disaster off America’s northeast Atlantic coast in just over three years occurred early Sunday. This tragedy, along with TWA Flight 800 and Swissair Flight 111, defied immediate explanation and claimed the lives of everyone aboard.

What was learned from the previous crashes, which claimed a total of 459 lives in 1996 and 1998, may help speed the investigation into Sunday’s crash of the EgyptAir Boeing 767-300ER and the deaths of its 217 passengers and crew members.

The Los Angeles-originated and Cairo-bound EgyptAir Flight 990 went down off Nantucket, Mass., less than an hour after it took off from New York’s Kennedy International Airport. The aircraft is believed to have just begun its cruise phase at 33,000 feet, flaps buttoned up and landing gear retracted, when something went wrong. Just what is a matter that investigators will need months if not years to determine.

Speculation on terrorism was immediate, given last month’s hijacking of another EgyptAir plane and the fact that EgyptAir 990 had some 30 members of the Egyptian military services aboard. But this time, mindful of the wild speculation on the cause of the TWA explosion three years ago, investigators said they anticipated a long process and downplayed the possibility of terrorism.

One lesson ought to be clear. Boeing should hand over every bit of information it has on the 767-300ER and let federal investigators decide what is pertinent. In the TWA Flight 800 investigation, Boeing angered National Transportation Safety Board investigators by failing to tell them about a 19-year-old study that showed fuel tanks overheating on military versions of its 747 jumbo jet. The cause of the TWA crash has been narrowed to an explosion in the center fuel tank.

A complicating factor this time is the fact that the investigation involves an airline owned by the Egyptian government that the Economist and other publications have reported has been the target of complaints about poor management and service.

Previous problems with the aircraft model, such as an in-flight malfunction of a reverse engine thruster that caused a 767-300 to crash in Thailand in 1991, were reportedly fixed on the EgyptAir plane.

One commitment by the airline industry is necessary to bring this investigation to a relatively quick conclusion: full and immediate cooperation from Boeing, EgyptAir and the airline’s foreign service contractors in providing any documents that the U.S. safety board needs. Immediately and without question.