Between Causes

By the time aviation authorities confirmed the aircraft had gone down, the terrorism narrative was already loading. Egyptian officials gestured toward it. French security sources leaked toward it. Western media ran with it. ISIS had not claimed responsibility — notably unusual for a high-profile incident they could have leveraged — but the absence of a claim was treated as ambiguity rather than evidence against. The window between "cause unknown" and "established cause" filled in within the news cycle with whatever each set of actors needed it to say.

This is the pattern. Call it the political colonization of aviation uncertainty.

The mechanics run the same way every time. A disaster occurs. The cause is genuinely unknown. Multiple political actors have existing frameworks within which the disaster would be useful — terrorism narratives, state security justifications, geopolitical leverage claims, rival state blame. In the window between the event and the established cause, each actor populates the uncertainty with whatever serves their load-bearing walls. The explanation that fits most institutional interests accrues the most media amplification. The eventual truth lands quietly, serves fewer interests, gets proportionally less coverage.

In 2016, the terrorism narrative served specific operational requirements. Egypt under el-Sisi had constructed an enormous security apparatus justified by the terrorism threat — after the Muslim Brotherhood, after the Sinai insurgencies, after the general securitization of Egyptian political life that followed 2013. A terrorism explanation for Flight 804 reinforced the necessity of that apparatus. France was eighteen months into an extended state of emergency following November 2015, with surveillance powers expanded and civil liberties contracted; the terrorism frame kept that emergency technically justified. The broader Western counter-terrorism architecture — intelligence agencies, legislative oversight committees, security contractors — all functioned better in a terrorism-cause world than a mechanical-cause world.

The investigators eventually pointed toward a fire in the cockpit area, likely originating from the co-pilot's oxygen system. Egypt and France disputed evidence access for years. The final investigation report didn't arrive until 2021, five years after the crash. By then the narrative had moved on to other uncertainties to colonize.

The pattern appears across the modern history of aviation disasters as geopolitical instruments. Pan Am 103 was colonized for decades by competing Libya/Syria/Iran blame narratives as the geopolitical winds shifted; the political utility of unresolved attribution outlasted the investigation itself. TWA 800's cause was established as a fuel tank ignition, but the terrorism reading circulated for months in the gap, doing political work before the technical conclusion arrived. MH17's cause was established quickly, but political deployment of that cause has been an ongoing weapon in the Russia-Ukraine conflict ever since. MH370 disappeared entirely and has been producing political interpretations in perpetuity, precisely because no established cause exists to displace them.

EgyptAir 804 was between causes for five years. The institutional interests that fed on the uncertainty while it lasted have long since found other uncertainties to feed on. The families now have something resembling an answer. The political architecture that exploited the ambiguity never acknowledged the exploitation; it simply moved on.

The cause was mechanical. The politics were not.

i · sources

• EgyptAir Flight 804 — Wikipedia
• EgyptAir MS804: What we know — BBC News, 2016-05-21