A hostage situation involving an EgyptAir A320 that was hijacked and forced to divert to Larnaca airport on the south coast of Cyprus is over after the hijacker was seen walking down the steps of the aircraft with his hands raised. .

Flight MS181,  carrying 56 passengers and6 crew from Alexandria to Cairo,was taken over mid air after a passenger said he was wearing an explosives belt.

"The pilot said that a passenger told him he had an explosives vest and forced the plane to land in Larnaca," the Egyptian civil aviation ministry said in a statement.

The Cypriot president insisted that the hijack was not terrorism-related.

Specualtion is that the Egyptian man – named by Cypriot officials as Seif Eldin Mustafa – wanted to talk to his estranged Cypriot wife, or perhaps instead he was seeking the release of female prisoners in Egypt. 

The hijacker's surrender came shortly after several people were seen fleeing the aircraft. One – apparently a crew member – escaped by climbing out of the aircraft's cockpit window.

FlyDubai’s workplace practices have come under intense scrutiny after a former senior pilot, turned whistle-blower, spoke up about  the airline’s rosters in turn  blaming them for the crash of Flight FZ981 at Rostov-on-Don on March 19th that killed all 62 aboard the Boeing 737.

The pilots had aborted their second attempt at landing and were climbing through 1550m at 370km/hr when their 737 suddenly – and without warning – plummeted into the airport disintegrating in a fireball beside the runway.
 
This week a former captain told the website RT.com that at Flydubai lack of sleep for flight crew was a major issue and he had warned management that “there would be an accident because of pilot fatigue.”
 
The five-year old aircraft was operating flight FZ981 from Dubai to Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and the pilots had spent 2.5 hours in a holding pattern waiting for bad weather to clear before attempting a second landing.

Many safety experts are already pointing the finger at fatigue and disorientation as factors.

On May 29th last year AirlineRatings.com in a special report called “Stressed Out” warned the industry of the massive pressures building on pilots of low cost airlines.

READ AirlineRatings special report on pilot fatigue

Yesterday the BCC claimed, citing colleagues, that the captain of the FlyDubai jet which crashed was due to leave the airlinestating fatigue as the reason.

Pilots speaking anonymously to the BBC say fatigue was a contributory factor in the accident – claims that FlyDubai says relate to "confidential information" the BBC said.

The BBC added that the pilots at the airline claim their colleagues are at "significant and obvious risk" from fatigue. One of the sources has already resigned and another says he will quit.

The three FlyDubai staff members told the BBC that the captain, Cypriot Aristos Sokratous, had already resigned and was serving out his three-month notice, stating fatigue and lifestyle as his main reasons for leaving.

"This crash was very close to home," a FlyDubai pilot told the BBC. "I don't want to speculate on what caused the crash, but I think that fatigue must have been a contributory factor. I'm also not surprised it happened.
"Crew are overworked and suffering from fatigue. It is a significant risk.

"Staff are going from night to day shifts without enough rest in between. I would say 50% of the airline's workforce are suffering from acute fatigue.

"I raised it with a senior member of staff at the airline who said 'we don't have a fatigue issue at FlyDubai'."

"Approximately 25 pilots out of 600 have resigned since the beginning of the year. From my understanding, most have cited fatigue, rosters and quality of life."

Another pilot who spoke to the BBC said he and colleagues had also raised the issue of fatigue with the airline's management and he had admitted falling asleep on the flight deck on one occasion due to exhaustion. He said he is going to resign from the airline.

"The degradation in performance is noticeable," the second pilot said.

"I have fallen asleep at the controls due to fatigue. I also didn't have full mental capabilities on approach, which is incredibly serious.

"I admitted it and raised it with senior staff but nothing was done about it.

In a statement to AirlineRatings.com the airline said: "For FlyDubai the safety and welfare of our flight crew and cabin crew is of primary importance. The whole aviation industry is heavily regulated.

"We strictly follow authorised flying duty time regulations in compiling duty rosters, with special attention paid to the variables which affect our crews including report times, previous duty and the number of days off.

"If a member of flight crew feels that, for whatever reason, they have not been able to get enough rest before starting a shift, our Safety Management Systems (SMS), encourages pilots to declare themselves unfit to fly."

But another pilot told AirlineRatings and RT.com that the problem was the timing of the shifts.

He argued that the crew often does not have enough time for sleep readjustment.
 
“Everybody at the company has these dangerous shifts from day flight to night flight, and then back to a day flight, and then back to a night flight, and it has definitely been a big issue for a long time,” he said.
 
“The way that Flydubai builds the schedules does not account for circadian rhythm and they do not allow pilots to get the right amount of rest, or the proper rest before a flight, and that is exactly what both of these pilots were, the situation that they were in, for sure,” the pilot added.
 
Separately AirlineRatings.com has learned from sources in Washington DC that a number of pilots have resigned from FlyDubai after the accident.
 
The source claimed that the other issue was subtle pressure not to divert in bad weather as it would disrupt the airline’s tight schedules.
 

Airports and airlines are virtually powerless to stop a repeat of the tragic suicide bombing that killed dozens in Brussels on Tuesday.

Calls to move the check-in perimeter further away from terminals only moves the problem – it does not solve it.

See Geoffrey Thomas on Bloomberg below 

Wherever people congregate – for whatever reason – you have a target.

The scale of the conundrum facing aviation security agencies is enormous.

This year 3.7 billion people – half the world’s population – will travel by air on more than 100,000 flights day.

It is simply mission impossible.

And it will be an impossible ask for passengers on a one hour flight to check in four hours early to go through three or four security checks at a remote location from the airport terminal.

And it would achieve nothing except move any explosion into a car park.

This level of security would paralyse air travel as we know it.

And the cost of a greatly enhanced security system would be staggering.

Since 911 the significantly enhanced security measures and related costs have soared to over 1 trillion dollars in the US alone.

In a paper Terror and the Economy: Which Institutions Help Mitigate the Damage? delivered in 2011 Professors John Mueller from Ohio State University and Professor Mark Stewart from the University of Newcastle in NSW warned that officials did not seemed to have conducted risk assessment and cost-benefit assessments.

In 2002 the 9/11 commission urged the US government to apply cost-benefit accounting measures to its security measures. 

However this was never done according to the paper with the result that according to The Economist nearly all but the most useless and stupid security measures have been approved.

Russian investigators are mystified by an unexplained plunge that led to the crash of a FlyDubai 737 which killed all 62 aboard in Russia on Saturday.

The pilots had aborted their second attempt at landing and were climbing through 1550m at 370km/hr when their 737 suddenly – and without warning – plummeted into the airport disintegrating in a fireball beside the runway.

Low grade CCTV vision clearly shows the 737 descending at high speed to impact but what is not so clear is whether the bright light was the aircraft’s landing lights or the 737 on fire.

World's safest airlines

The five-year old aircraft was operating flight FZ981 from Dubai to Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and had spent 2.5 hours in a holding pattern waiting for bad weather to clear before attempting a second landing.

The 737-800, registration A6-FDN had aborted the first approach to Rostov's runway 22 at 1.41am local time due to weather and entered various holding patterns waiting for an improvement in the weather.

Data from Flightradar24 then shows the 737 descending to an altitude of 1550 feet for its second attempt to land when it began to climb again at 5.6 km short of the runway.

It reached an altitude of 3975 feet and then entered a steep descent before impacting the airport.

The 737 had sufficient fuel for another 2 hours of flight and could have easily diverted to another airport as an Aeroflot flight had done earlier.

The pilots of the 737 were termed as “quite experienced” by the airline with the Cypriot captain having 5,965 hours while the Spanish co-captain 5,769 hours.

Authorities in Russia say they have ruled out terrorism and according to investigative committee spokeswoman Oksana Kovrizhnaya, they will be looking at technical issues, severe weather and human error.

Kovrizhnaya told CNN that the investigations will take at least two months, as required by Russian law, but "could be prolonged."
Russian investigators will be joined by a team from the UAE as well as representatives from the US National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing.

The aircraft’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder have both been recovered.

FlyDubai said that 44 of the passengers were Russians, eight Ukrainian, two Indian and one Uzbekistani. Thirty-three of the passengers were women, 18 were men and four were children.

FlyDubai is a Dubai based low cost airline formed in 2009 that operates to 95 destinations with 50 aircraft.
Up to yesterday's crash it had a perfect safety record.