Thursday’s (May 19) EgyptAir plane crash comes just two months since the last major incident involving the airline.
ADVERTISEMENTThursday’s (May 19) EgyptAir plane crash comes just two months since the last major incident involving the airline. On March 29, a domestic flight travelling from Alexandria to Cairo was hijacked and forced to land in Larnaca, Cyprus.
The pilot of EgyptAir flight 181 was threatened by a passenger apparently wearing a suicide belt which later turned out to be fake.
The passenger was later arrested after giving himself up.
Witnesses said he threw a letter on the tarmac at Larnaca airport, asking for it to be delivered to his Cypriot ex-wife.
MetroJet flight 9268
The Egyptian aviation industry had been reeling from the crash of a Russian passenger jet last year over the Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Metrojet flight 9268 broke into pieces shortly after reaching its cruising altitude on October 31. All 224 people on board, mostly Russian tourists, were killed.
The flight was headed to Saint Petersburg from the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Authorities in Moscow said the plane was been brought down by a terrorist act.
Russian forensic experts had taken swabs from debris at the crash site.
The head of the country’s Federal Security Service said that explosives were detected, explaining why plane fragments had been scattered over a wide area.
Flash Airlines flight 604
In 2004 an plane chartered by Egypt’s Flash Airlines crashed into the Red Sea.
All 148 people on board flight 604 were killed .. mostly French tourists on their way home from a holiday in Sharm.
Concerns over the plane’s condition emerged shortly afterwards. The eleven-year-old Boeing had failed safety checks in Switzerland and the airline had been banned from flying over the country.
For more than a decade, until the downing of the Metrojet plane, it was Egypt’s worst aviation disaster.