CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- A U.S. team is probing health records of the pilot and co-pilot of crashed EgyptAir Flight 990, despite the airline's assertion that both men were in good physical and mental condition, officials said Sunday.
The probe came amid angry remarks from EgyptAir officials that U.S. investigators should concentrate on the possibility that the plane might have been downed by something other than pilot error."They were among our best pilots," said Hassan Misharfa, EgyptAir head of operations. "They had long experience and, in addition to that, they had passed all professional, safety and psychological tests successfully."
EgyptAir officials said the U.S. team, which includes security experts and investigators from Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board, is checking the health and flying records of pilot Ahmed el-Habashy and co-pilot Adel Anwar as well as their backgrounds.
"They are trying to find out if they had any sort of problems," the officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Downplaying the significance of investigators' requests to see personnel records, EgyptAir Deputy Chairman Mohammed Shaheen said that investigators "are asking to see all the records in the world."
"This does not mean that they are implicating anyone or implying anything," Shaheen told The Associated Press.
Preliminary data released Friday showed that the plane was put into a dive so steep and fast that passengers briefly would have been rendered weightless. And both engines were shut off before the aircraft climbed out of its dive, then turned and plunged into the ocean.
"This is illogical. If that is really what happened, the pilots would have steadily flown the plane like a glider. All our pilots are well trained on gliding," said Isam Ahmed, head of EgyptAir's Flying Institute.
"Only an explosion could have done this," he told journalists.
Foreign Minister Amr Moussa cautioned Sunday against speculation, urging people to wait for the outcome of the U.S. investigation.
On Saturday, EgyptAir chairman Mohammed Fahim Rayan said el-Habashy and Anwar had undergone routine physical and psychological checkups in the past five months and had been deemed fit.
Investigators in the United States are trying to determine what brought down the New York-to-Cairo flight on Oct. 31, killing all 217 people on board. Late Saturday night, the Navy recovered the cockpit voice recorder from wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean off Nantucket Island. It was to be taken Sunday for analysis at the NTSB laboratory in Washington.
EgyptAir officials would help NTSB investigators interpret the information and distinguish the pilot's and co-pilot's voices, Rayan said.