EgyptAir Flight 990
Egyptair Flight 990 was a flight that flew on a Los Angeles-New York-Cairo route (Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, New York to Cairo International Airport in Cairo, Egypt). On October 31, 1999, Flight 990 dived into the Atlantic Ocean near Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.
Radar and radio contact with the Boeing 767-366ER aircraft (callsign SU-GAP) was lost 30 minutes after the aircraft departed JFK Airport in New York on a flight to Cairo. The flight descended from flight level FL330 to FL191 in 36 seconds.
The flight was carrying 15 crew members and 202 passengers.
An investigation by the NTSB determined that the copilot, Gameel Al-Batouti, seized control of the plane when the pilot was out of the cockpit, turned off the autopilot, and deliberately crashed the plane into the ocean, while calmly reciting "I rely on God" and counteracting the pilot's valiant efforts to recover from the dive. The investigation and its results drew severe criticism from the Government of Egypt. The numerous alternative theories proposed by Egyptian authorites were tested by the NTSB - none were found to match the facts.
Myth
Several days after the crash, many people, particularly in the United States, started calling the tragedy a possible warning of things to come, based on the flight's number (990, which people thought was a message from God to expect tragic things during the changing, on New Year's eve, from 1999 to 2000) and the worrying Y2K situation. The fact that the crash occured on October 31, which is Halloween also did not go un-noticed in this regard. Soon after the new year arrived without incidents, of course, the myth of flight 990 being a sign from God disappeared.
Persons familiar with the so-called major system for memorizing numbers would recognize that the number 990 can be encoded by words that contain the consonants P,P, and S. One such code word that represents the number 990 would of course be the word PEPSI. If one were to ask if by analogy COKE might be next, then indeed the words DIET COKE and TEQUILA using the standard phonetic alphabet generate the numbers 11 and 77 and 175 which are of course three of the flight numbers from the September 11th attack. Curiously, using the same phonetic cipher the word Al Qaeda encodes the number 571.
During the summer of 2003, following the issuance of the now classified report about the Septebmer 11th attack, many govenment officials such as Senator Bob Graham began to make criticisms that the September 11th attack might have easilly been predicted, if not outright prevented in part or altoghether. Following these critcisms, President Bush declassified the August 5, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing which indicated that "Bin Laden Determined to Attack United States", and which indicated that hijackings might be one possible mode of attack.
With the apparent intentional crash of flight 990 by its co-pilot, and a similar intentional crash of PSA flight 1771 by a disgruntled former employee known as David Burke in 1987, the historic record of persons intentially crashing airliners certainly must present itself as a precedent, if not a warning. Nonetheless, representives of the Bush admisitration in early 2004 stated that "nobody could have imagined that ... hijackers would intentionally crash .... hijackers usualy want to live."
Perhaps we are expected to believe that there is such a poverty of imagination in this country that we will blindly vote for Bush in Novemeber? (I know POV!!) Because of the the abundance of tabloid type conspiracy theories that propagate over the Internet, by word of mouth, or in the media, most people are rightly skeptical. In the state of Mosourri, they have a saying "Show Me", which when the major system for translating phrases into numbers is applied to the phrase "Show Me", one obtains the number 63, which by a remarkable coincidence yields the flight number of the so called shoe bomber. In effect, ever since the so called shoe bomber incindent, people have been asked by airport inspectors to "show me your shoes."
It remains an open question as to whether this type of numerology has played a specific role in the planning of major terrorist attacks, or if it is a mere coincidence that such attacks have occured with such degrees of symbolism.
Conspiracy Theory
Some conspiracy theorists (Google search yielding about 26 hits: [1]) believe that the crash was the first successful test of a 767/757 remote control system that was used in the September 11, 2001 attacks. There were high-ranking Egyptian military officers on board ([2]) and the NTSB is not known to have investigated this possibility.