CAIRO (AFP) - Egyptian investigators released a preliminary factual report on the crash of a Flash Airlines aircraft that left 148 dead in January, but made no statement on the cause of the tragedy.
The 430-page report, which was posted on the Internet at and presented to the press on Thursday, provides a second-by-second account of the facts recorded by the two black boxes of the Boeing 737.
It transcribes the technical data of the flight and the conversations of crew members between take-off at 0242 GMT on January 3rd and its crash off the coast of the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh three minutes later.
The last lines of the readings describes how the captain said "Come out", as his plane was nose-diving and recovering from a severe bank angle, a second before a ground proximity warning that was the last information recorded by the black box.
Senior Egyptian investigator Shaker Kelada repeated Thursday that it was too early to determine what had caused the crash, which killed 148 people, including 13 crew members and the 135 mainly French holiday-makers on board.
"In the next stage, we will cross-examine the data we have collected and we will then observe whether the crash was the result of a faulty automatic pilot or a human error by the pilot," he said.
He stressed that the factual report was only the sum of a fact-finding effort, including the black box readings and the results of testing at Boeing's headquarters in Seattle, Washington.
In the coming months, the report will be analysed by the Egyptian, French and US parties involved and a final report determining the cause of the crash is expected to be issued in June 2005.
"We have established how, now he have to determine why," Kelada told reporters.
The various parties will have two months to analyse the report and another two months to draft their conclusions. These separate interpretations will then be compiled into a single document to form the final report.
On November 1, some 200 relatives of the French tourists who died in the crash demonstrated in front of the Egyptian embassy in Paris to complain about the delay in the investigation.
Paul-Louis Arsalian, who heads the French Investigation and Analysis Office which was set up after the crash told AFP that the preliminary report wuold be discussed by the families of the victims during a special meeting in Paris on November 20.
11/11/2004 - 18:09 GMT - AFP