Searchers Find ‘Significant Piece’ of EgyptAir Jet

Searchers scouring the sea for debris from EgyptAir Flight 990 discovered a “significant piece” of the aircraft Monday and detected a faint pinging, likely from a flight recorder. They also found smaller parts of the plane, fragmented human remains, clothing, passports and a teddy bear.

The possibility of finding either of the plane’s two flight recorders--known as “black boxes”--raised hopes that investigators soon would get their first key clues to what caused the Boeing 767 to plummet into the Atlantic early Sunday after stopping in New York on a flight from Los Angeles to Cairo. All 217 people on board were killed.

This hope was strengthened by the discovery of what Coast Guard Rear Adm. Richard Larrabee called “a large piece of aircraft structure.” It was floating on the sea, Larrabee said, indicating that it contained an enclosed space and might include a sealed bulkhead or a fuel tank. It was so big, he said, that a crane would have to lift it out of the water to put it on a barge.

Larrabee and National Transportation Safety Board investigators spoke to reporters as cutters brought debris to shore and more vessels steamed to the crash site, 60 miles south of Nantucket. They included the Whiting, with side-scanning sonar; the Grapple, with divers and a TV-equipped robot submarine to search the ocean floor, as well as pincers to grasp small objects; and the Mohawk, bringing devices to pinpoint the pinging.

Vehicles carrying about 80 families of the crash victims arrived in Newport from New York. An additional 100 families were expected to come later in the week. The remains of their loved ones were being taken to a temporary morgue near a Newport hotel, which was designated as a family assistance center. Dozens of grief counselors were on hand.

EgyptAir said it would provide charter flights from Cairo to bring relatives of the Egyptian passengers. The victims apparently included 33 Egyptian military officers, according to the Pentagon. The group was made up primarily of pilots who apparently were training in the United States. U.S. officials were trying to determine where.

Other members of the Egyptian military group might have been visiting this country for talks with American defense contractors, officials said. Egyptian authorities maintained silence on the subject. Although Egypt is the second-largest recipient of American aid in the world, U.S.-Egyptian military cooperation is a sensitive subject.

Family members will help in the “difficult process” of identifying remains, said Peter Goelz, an NTSB representative. NTSB Chairman James E. Hall said the recovery and investigation into the cause of the crash of Flight 990 would be painstaking. He and other officials said they had no evidence of sabotage and did not know why the plane fell.

“This,” Hall said, “will be a long investigation.”

Two Black Boxes Aboard Jetliner

One of the black boxes aboard the aircraft was a cockpit voice recorder. The other was a flight data recorder. Both were encased in steel designed to help them survive a crash, and both were designed to survive emersion--even as deep as the 250 to 270 feet of water at the crash site.

Such recorders originally were painted black, which is how they got their name, but now they are painted orange to make them easier to find. Upon impact, both emit a pinging signal.

The voice recorder uses a continuous loop of audiotape or a digital system to preserve the last 30 minutes of sound in the cockpit. Because Flight 990 was in the air only about 20 minutes after takeoff from New York, this recorder should have preserved all cockpit conversation along with the identifiable sounds of the engines, controls being moved and switches being flipped.

It could provide investigators with important indications of what went on during the final moments of flight.

The flight data recorder logs information about 40 technical aspects of the flight. These include engine power, flight control settings, air speed, altitude, attitude and the forces of gravity.

This information, too, would help investigators know what happened aboard the plane.

“At this point in time, we have no indication of criminal activity,” said Barry Maun, an FBI agent at the crash scene. Hall added, however, that “we have learned not to rule in or rule out anything.”

As of nightfall Monday, only one body had been recovered from the ocean. It was largely intact, Larrabee said. “We have begun to see evidence of further human remains,” he added but declined to elaborate.

Other sources described the remains as extremely fragmented.

Forensic pathologists were expected to work for months to positively identify the victims, using DNA and dental records.

“We believe at this point it is in everyone’s best interest to understand that we will no longer find survivors,” Larrabee said Monday. In the beginning, he said, the Coast Guard conducted a search-and-rescue operation.

“Now,” he said, “it is a search and recovery operation.”

Investigators Looking at Radar Site Data

Besides salvaging parts of the plane, investigators were gathering and beginning to analyze data from several radar sites that tracked the aircraft as it left John F. Kennedy International Airport and flew east, reaching an altitude of 33,000 feet before diving steeply and falling into the sea.

This data were still preliminary, sources close to the investigation said, but the initial studies indicated that the plane did not break up during its rapid descent from 33,000 to 19,000 feet. During that part of its dive, the sources said, radar seemed to show a single image of the aircraft and indicated that its transponder was operating as well.

Because radar is two-dimensional, a transponder is necessary to read the plane’s altimeter and broadcast its altitude to air traffic controllers, thus providing them with a three-dimensional picture of its flight.

The fact that the transponder was operating as low as 19,000 feet means that the aircraft still had electrical power.

Below 19,000 feet, however, the sources said, the transponder ceased to operate.

In addition, the sources said, the radar might have picked up more than one image of the plane below 19,000 feet, indicating that the aircraft might have begun breaking up.

None of the debris recovered at the crash site showed any signs of charring or smoke damage, which seemed to lessen the likelihood that the jetliner exploded or caught fire in flight.

The debris--recovered as searchers in ships and aircraft crisscrossed a 9,000-square-mile patch of ocean--included evacuation slides, life preservers, passenger seats and cushions, as well as clothing and paperwork.

One challenge was to find a site large enough to accommodate all of the pieces of the plane, much like a jigsaw puzzle that investigators would put back together to help them study the crash.

“This kind of effort requires a lot of planning,” Hall said, adding that as many as 1,000 people already were involved in the probe.

Inquiry Likely to Continue for Months

Retrieving pieces of the aircraft might prove to be even more difficult than finding parts of TWA Flight 800 after it exploded off Long Island in July 1996 and disintegrated in water only half as deep.

It took many months to reassemble Flight 800. The NTSB believes its explosion might have been caused by faulty wiring in an almost empty fuel tank.

Hall said the EgyptAir investigation was likely to continue for months, perhaps years.

In New York, Gov. George Pataki visited with victims’ families at a hotel near JFK Airport before they were taken to Providence, R.I.

Pataki said he had gotten calls from people who lost loved ones on TWA Flight 800, and they offered to help counsel relatives of victims in the EgyptAir crash.

“We cannot really comprehend the level or magnitude of their grief,” he said of the EgyptAir families, “but we can be there to help them and to pray with them and to support them in every way possible.”

* Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Cairo, Paul Richter in Washington, John J. Goldman in New York and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles contributed to this report.