Doomed EgyptAir Airbus 'should not have taken off', French report says

An Airbus jet operated by EgyptAir that crashed over the Mediterranean almost three years ago, killing all 66 people on board, should have been grounded because of a series of technical issues on previous flights, according to a French investigation.

The report, ordered by the French judiciary, stops short of drawing firm conclusions about the precise cause of the disaster but makes clear a serious of previous issues with the plane should not have been ignored.

Flight MS804, which was bound from Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport to Cairo, plunged into the sea between Crete and the northern coast of Egypt after disappearing from radars.

All passengers and crew on board, including 40 Egyptians and 15 French citizens, lost their lives in the crash of the A320.

The Egyptian authorities rapidly suggested that the crash was due to an attack, but French officials have always preferred the theory that it was caused by a technical problem.

Three Paris judges investigating the case ordered two probes to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to the crash, with results from the first handed over to magistrates in June.

In the document of 76 pages, first reported by the Le Parisien newspaper and seen by AFP, the two experts complain of "the considerable lack of rigour on the part of crew and the technical services of EgyptAir" in processing the aircraft's technical documents.

The report, by a technical expert and an aeronautic expert, says there were several incidents concerning the operation of the aircraft which were not reported by the pilots and thus not followed up by maintenance teams.

These faults "were not signalled when the aircraft was at its principal base in Cairo, apparently so that it would not be grounded for repairs".

"The examination has shown that this aircraft should have been subject to checks during its four previous flights and should not have taken off from Cairo after a sequence of recurring faults which were not signalled by successive crews."