Culture Crash
A conversation with William Langewiesche, the author of "The Crash of EgyptAir 990," on the cultural reverberations of a seemingly straightforward airplane crash
On October 31, 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 plunged into the Atlantic ocean soon after takeoff, killing all 217 people aboard. The flight-data and cockpit voice recorders were recovered within weeks, and the story they told seemed shocking but conclusive: at a moment when the captain was out of the cockpit, the copilot, Gameel al-Batouti, disengaged the autopilot and calmly pushed the airplane into a steep dive. When the captain returned, Batouti fought him for control of the airplane—and then turned off the engines. But the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), charged with investigating the crash, soon realized that what they had thought would be a simple, open and shut case would actually require all of the political and diplomatic skills they could muster. The Egyptian investigators professed outrage at the idea that the crash would be called intentional, which they seemed to feel was a cultural slight—setting off a conflict with the NTSB that continues to this day. The Egyptians went on to raise theory after theory for what could have caused the crash, and the NTSB, with the help of Boeing, performed extensive tests to see if any of the theories matched the flight's profile. None of them did.
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Become a SubscriberWilliam Langewiesche spent several months researching "The Crash of EgyptAir 990" (November Atlantic), looking at the flight data, flying simulations of the crash, meeting with the NTSB, and traveling to Cairo to interview the Egyptian investigators. His piece is not so much the story of an airplane accident as it is the story of the cultural clash between the NTSB and the Egyptians—a clash that has big implications for relations between the U.S., Egypt, and the Middle East as a whole. I spoke with him on November 8.
