Fire in the cockpit, that's the probable cause of the crash of EgyptAir flight MS804 in 2016, according to the French investigation team from the BEA.
The French civil aviation accident bureau said that onboard recorders suggested that the blaze had spread rapidly through the aircraft. At a press briefing on Friday, the BEA said: "the most likely hypothesis is that a fire broke out in the cockpit while the aeroplane was flying at its cruise altitude and that the fire spread rapidly resulting in the loss of control of the aeroplane".
The investigator's say that the flight crew could be heard discussing a fire on the cockpit voice recorder and that systems on board had detected smoke inside the aircraft. Sixty-six passengers and crew died when the flight from Paris to Cairo came down over the eastern Mediterranean.
The findings and from the BEA directly contradicts an earlier statement from Egyptian officials that had claimed explosives had been found on victims' remains, which in turn suggested the aircraft had been brought down by a bomb. They said at the time that it was likely to have been a terrorist incident, especially as it came just seven months after a Russian plane was brought down by a bomb over the Sinai peninsula.
The BEA and the rest of the world now have to wait for the Egyptian investigators to issue their final report into the incident to learn fully the differences in information processed and the conclusions each nation has come to.
