Faulty Phone Battery May Have Caused Fire That Brought Down EgyptAir Flight MS80 (ibtimes.co.uk)

New submitter drunkdrone writes: "French authorities investigating the EgyptAir crash that killed 66 people last year believe that the plane may have been brought down by an overheating phone battery," reports International Business Times. Investigators say the fire that broke out on the Airbus A320 in May 2016 started in the spot where the co-pilot had stowed his iPad and iPhone 6S, which he placed on top of the instrument panel in the plane's cockpit. From the report: "EgyptAir flight MS804 was traveling from Paris to Cairo when it disappeared from radar on 19 May 2016. Egyptian investigators have speculated that the crash, which killed all 56 passengers, seven crew members and three security personnel on board, was caused by an act of terrorism due to traces of explosives reported to be found on some the victims. Investigators in France have disputed these claims, saying that data recorded from the aircraft around the time it disappeared points to an accidental fire on the right-hand side of the flight deck, next to the co-pilot. According to The Times, CCTV pulled from cameras at Paris' Charles de Gualle airport show that the co-pilot stored a number of personal items above the dashboard, where the first signs of trouble were detected. This included an automated alert indicating a series of malfunctions on the right-hand flight deck window, followed by smoke alerts going off in a toilet and in the avionics area below the cockpit, minutes before the plane vanished."

Comments

Re:The story smells fishy

[Registered Coward v2]

The batteries burn, not violently explode. The pilots would have seen and smelt smoke, and done something about it, like move the phone out of the cockpit.

This is more likely a pilot suicide.

It's quite possible;e by the time the fire was discovered it was too late. A very hot fire could quickly get out of control, such as one that brought down SwissAir 111.

Cockpit recorder: Trying to put out fire in cockpi

[raymorris]

The recorder did in fact record the pilots trying to put out a fire in the cockpit.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

Re:The story smells fishy

[Gr8Apes]

There would seriously be some cursing and yelling on the cockpit tape if a battery caught fire like those Samsung phones - just look at the videos.

So the articles are all wrong?

[raymorris]

The sub-headline of the story I linked to is:

--
Information from the flight's cockpit voice recorder suggests the pilot tried to extinguish a fire in the cockpit before the plane crashed
--

The French article says:
--
the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) indicates that one of the two pilot present in the cockpit of flight MS 804 ...
  it was not this fire that suddenly cut, at 37,000 feet, the other black box, the flight recorder (FDR)
--
Translated by Google translate.

The article explicitly says "not the OTHER black box, the flight data recorder".

Re:So the articles are all wrong?

[Tough Love]

Yes, your link trumps mine. The Figaro article from July certainly says that, and there are other reports of the word "fire" from the voice recorder, so I guess they did recover data from it, and the Wikipedia article could use an update. The whole thing seems to be a bit short on official comment, this latest being hearsay from "a source from the investigation".