By: Mark Dombroff<\/p>\n

No news is no news.\u00a0 As of this moment, there have been reports that one of the pingers on one of the recorders of EgyptAir 804 has been heard.\u00a0 So far however, no aircraft.<\/p>\n

Even if the pingers have been heard, searchers still have to locate the recorders, which, reportedly, are located in water as deep as 10,000 feet.\u00a0 Then they have to recover them.\u00a0 The bottom line is that there\u2019s still a lot to be accomplished before we, hopefully, know what happened to EgyptAir 804.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the story has pretty much fallen off the front page and, doesn\u2019t appear to qualify as \u201cBreaking News,\u201d even if we use the somewhat expansive definition of CNN.<\/p>\n

Under ICAO Annex 13, Egypt is leading the investigation since they are the \u201cstate\u201d of registry of the aircraft.\u00a0 France is an accredited representative, as is the United States, the former because it was an Airbus aircraft, the latter because the engines were manufactured in the U.S.\u00a0 The responsibility for determining probable cause and writing the report resides with Egypt.<\/p>\n

The most notable interaction between U.S. and Egypt in the context of an aircraft accident came in the context of the 1999 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990.\u00a0 In that investigation, to make a long story short, the NTSB concluded the cause of the crash and the death of all on-board was suicide by the relief co-pilot.\u00a0 The Egyptian Government however, in a diametrically opposed result, concluded the cause was a defect in the aircraft.<\/p>\n

If one reads the record, there is no question but that the NTSB, the world standard in accident investigation, got it 100 percent right.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t even a close call.<\/p>\n

One could argue there was a genuine basis for disagreement regarding the results of the investigation.\u00a0 However, the reality is that the vehement disagreement of the Egyptian investigation with what was so clearly suicide, was, and likely continues to be, national pride and the simple refusal to acknowledge that suicide by a pilot for its national airline could be responsible for such a horrific act.<\/p>\n

Well, here we are, not quite 20 years later and all we have is questions and speculation about EgyptAir 804.\u00a0 Let\u2019s hope that we don\u2019t have a repeat of what occurred surrounding the investigation of EgyptAir 990 in 1999.\u00a0 We have no reason to believe that such a thing would occur, but Plane-ly Spoken would not have ever believed it could have occurred about 20 years ago.\u00a0 If it were to happen again, that would qualify as \u201cBreaking News!\u201d