Numb with shock or with tears streaming down their faces, around 35 relatives of some of the 148 people aboard the Egyptian charter plane that crashed into the Red Sea gathered yesterday at Paris’s main airport where the aircraft had been due to touch down at 8am.
By the afternoon, airport authorities had set up a crisis centre for the relatives of the 133 French tourists — many of them children — who died. Some relatives had stood for hours in front of the arrivals board which showed the Flash Airlines Boeing 737 as being delayed before they were informed more than two hours after it should have landed that the plane had fallen into the Red Sea after apparently suffering from a mechanical failure.
Whole families — one of seven members — who had been on holiday over the schools’ festive breaks, were wiped out in the crash, which happened close to where Tony Blair and his family are on holiday. Today relatives of the French victims will be flown to Egypt on a government charter flight to identify relatives. ‘They are in shock,’ Michel Clerel, in charge of counselling, told reporters at a hotel near the airport.
‘They were waiting for family members to come back from a holiday, then it was brutally announced to them that they had died,’ said Clerel, the head of medical services at Charles de Gaulle airport.
Egypt’s Civil Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafeeq said the dead included 133 French, one Japanese, one Moroccan and 13 Egyptian crew. Speaking at Sharm el-Sheik airport, Shafeeq said: ‘The first indications suggest a technical fault.’
The last communication with the plane was at 5 300 feet. According to radar images, after take-off the plane turned left as normal. Sixty seconds later it suddenly straightened out and turned right before plunging to the sea.
‘There is a possibility something might have gone wrong with the transmission equipment that the pilot couldn’t control,’ Shafeeq, a former Egyptian air force commander, said.
Last night there were reports that one of the doomed passengers on the flight from Egypt’s holiday resort of Sharm el-Sheik, had called her nephew on a mobile phone as the plane went down.
Fatima Hjiaj, a 47-year-old mother of five, called Mohammed Hjiaj in Paris. ‘She said ”something’s happening to the flight” then there were screams from the air hostess standing next to her and the line cut,’ he said.
In France and Egypt, distraught family members gathered at airports and travel offices, desperate for news of loved ones who had been aboard Flash Airlines Flight FSH604, bound for Paris after a stop in Cairo.
Clerel said many children were on the plane and that entire families had died together.
Looking pale and shaken, a couple in their fifties arrived at the terminal, desperately seeking information.
‘My children are at Sharm. How do I find out if they were on the plane?’ the man asked an airport official. The couple were escorted to the crisis centre.
There was despair too at the Flash Airlines office in Cairo, where relations of the Moroccan and Egyptian crew gathered. A man checking on his daughter, a stewardess, walked out in despair, supported by relatives. ‘Samia, Samia,’ he wailed.
In France, airport staff reassured relatives of passengers on other flights who turned up at the airport desperately worried because earlier information had not identified the company. One man, Bruno Fouquet, arrived at the airport worried that friends had been on the plane. He went to the crisis centre to discover they were on a later flight. ‘I can’t wait to see them,’ he said.
Relatives sobbed and rushed to hug loved ones who disembarked from a later plane from Sharm-el-Sheikh that landed safely.
‘We’ve just spent the longest three hours of our lives,’ said Sonia Aicardi, whose in-laws were supposed to be on the flight but were taken off at the last minute.
Airport staff said they were surprised that representatives of only 17 families had turned up to meet the flight.
‘This only strengthens our fears that whole families have been wiped out in the crash,’ one said. ‘This was a popular destination for family Christmas and New Year school holidays in the sun. Several of the waiting relatives were grandparents.’
Waiting relatives were informed by the junior Transport Minister, Dominique Bussereau, that the plane had suffered technical problems. The jet had taken off just before dawn but fell into the sea near an island seven kilometres from the hotels where the tourists had been staying. No list of passengers had been published.
Olivier de Ronseray, manager of the Sofitel at Sharm-el-Sheikh, said few bodies had been recovered.
‘No one saw the plane go down as it was still dark,’ he said. Most of the passengers had booked through France’s third-biggest travel firm, FRAM, and nearly all came from the Paris area.
Bernard Chabert, air correspondent for the radio network Europe 1, said it was ‘a good little company’ that operated two 10-year-old Boeing 737s.
‘It is clear that there was communication between the crew and the airport control tower in the few minutes before the plane came down,’ he said.
‘There doesn’t seem any doubt over technical problems being the cause. The four-hour delay before details were released by the Egyptian authorities shows they had plenty of time to check out a possible terrorist action.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â