Jetliner Dived, Climbed, Then Dived Again Before Crash

EgyptAir Flight 990 dived from 33,000 feet to 16,000, climbed back to 24,000 feet, and then dived again to 10,000 feet before apparently breaking up and crashing into the sea, Air Force radar data showed Wednesday.

The puzzling data seemed to raise more questions than they answered about Sunday’s crash that killed all 217 aboard the Boeing 767 jetliner.

Whether the jumbo jet climbed out of the initial dive on its own or at the initiation of its pilots was not known, and National Transportation Safety Board officials declined to speculate on what happened.

Radar utilized by the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control system is two-dimensional, showing airplanes’ movement across the surface of the Earth but not providing information on their altitude. Altitude information is provided to FAA controllers by a device on board airplanes called a transponder, which reads the aircraft’s altimeter and broadcasts the information by radio.

But the Air Force has far more sophisticated radar that it uses to track what it perceives as potentially hostile aircraft. This radar provides information on both a plane’s movement across the ground and its altitude, and it was an evaluation of data from this radar that the Air Force gave to the NTSB on Wednesday.

John Clare, an NTSB radar specialist, said the data showed that the Boeing 767, which had taken off from New York on a scheduled flight to Cairo, was flying over the Atlantic about 60 miles south of Nantucket Island when it suddenly went into a dive, plummeting toward the water at a rate near the speed of sound--much faster than the plane was designed to fly.

Clare said the plane slowed slightly as it approached 16,000 feet when, for some reason, its transponder stopped working. The initial dive took about 40 seconds.

Over the next 45 seconds, he said, the jetliner, which continued to be traced by Air Force radar, climbed back to 24,000 feet, then dived again to 10,000 feet, where it disappeared from the Air Force tracking screens.

But the FAA radar continued to follow the aircraft, down to an altitude of about 1,800 feet, where the curvature of Earth blocked the view of the plane. Clare said the radar “picked up multiple returns” during the drop from 10,000 to 1,800 feet. He said these multiple images “moved with the wind” before splashing into the sea.

Aviation experts said the multiple images probably indicated the jetliner was breaking up.

“That’s going to be the speculation,” Clare said. But he refused to comment further about the apparent breakup, stressing that the data are preliminary and that further analysis is required before any conclusions can be made.

Powerful winds and heavy seas prevented Navy and Coast Guard ships from resuming their search-and-recovery operations Wednesday. Officials said forecasts indicate no break in the weather before the weekend.

The Navy has located the approximate position of Flight 990’s two “black box” recorders on the ocean bottom, beneath 250 feet of water. It is hoped improving weather will permit recovery of the devices by Sunday or Monday.

The recorders could provide important clues about the Boeing 767’s strange flight path and what caused it to crash.

Meanwhile, the mood among the nearly 180 family members here has shifted from grief to frustration over the slow recovery effort, over their inability to visit the military base where a small amount of wreckage has been taken and over questions about how long it will take to issue death certificates. Many relatives were devastated Tuesday when NTSB officials told them the bodies most likely would not be recovered intact.

“We’re tired, we want to go home and we want to put our loved ones to rest,” Mike Crow of Seattle told Associated Press. Two relatives and two friends of Crow’s wife were among the 217 people killed in the crash.

At least three of the relatives were treated at a hospital Wednesday, apparently after being overcome by emotion.

American Red Cross officials said they were making arrangements with federal agencies for a memorial service by the end of the week.