WHAT HAPPENED? UNTIL ABRUPT ENDING, FLIGHT WAS ROUTINE.

Byline: Deborah Hastings Associated Press 

The Boeing 767 was late getting to Los Angeles. The reason was routine - bad weather on the East Coast. Then a tire needed to be changed, food and fuel loaded, castoff pillows and blankets cleared from the aisles.

Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing suspicious. Just an annoying four-hour wait for 33 passengers en route Saturday to New York, and then traveling nonstop to Cairo on EgyptAir Flight 990.

The first five-hour leg was uneventful. So, too, was its 12:48 a.m. landing Sunday at Kennedy International Airport. Then 167 more passengers got on, as did a crew of 18.

There was nothing to indicate that in less than two hours, Flight 990 would no longer exist.

The search for what destroyed the plane would be slow, meticulous and heartbreaking. There were no immediate clues, officials said.

The only passenger to get off in New York was grief counselor and EgyptAir consultant Ed McLaughlin. His services were needed in less than an hour.

As an employee of the Family Enterprise Institute, he is hired by airline companies to do one of their worst jobs - notify and console the families of crash victims.

McLaughlin had already participated in a post-crash news conference before reporters learned he'd been on the flight's Los Angeles segment.

At Kennedy, 66 minutes passed before the twin-engine aircraft taxied from the gate, a normal interval for such overseas flights. ``There were no delays, no disruptions. No events that were untoward in any way,'' said Port Authority aviation director Robert Kelly.

Standard Time moved clocks back an hour, and 2:03 a.m. became 1:03 a.m. Sixteen minutes later, the jet wheels of Flight 990 left the runway.

The plane headed over the Atlantic on a common overseas route that passes over Nantucket Island. From there, it would turn north, flying along the U.S. coastline toward Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, then follow a Great Circle route over the North Atlantic toward Europe and its final destination in Egypt.

Air traffic controllers cleared the plane to 33,000 feet, a typical altitude for long-distance flights.

There was no distress call. The last communication from EgyptAir's pilot came at 1:43 a.m. and was perfectly normal, authorities said.

About 2 a.m., the jetliner slammed into the Atlantic Ocean 65 miles southeast of Nantucket. All 217 people on board are believed dead. At least 60 were American tourists, some of whom planned to sail down the Nile or cross into Israel. They hailed from New York, Vermont, California, the Southwest and points between.

They sat with natives of Egypt, Sudan, Syria and Chile. The plane was scheduled to land in Cairo on Sunday afternoon, local time.

Instead, they became the newest entry on a recent list of aircraft and lives swallowed by the Atlantic. They follow Swissair Flight 111, which charted a similar route and crashed last year off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing all 229 aboard after the cockpit filled with smoke; the private plane flown by John F. Kennedy Jr., carrying his wife and sister-in-law, which plummeted three months ago into the waters off Martha's Vineyard; the crash of 1996's TWA Flight 800, which took the life of every passenger and crew member - 230 in all.

On the other side of the Atlantic, where the scheduled arrival of Flight 990 never happened, relatives fainted and keened, their grief carved in every facial contortion.

In contrast to EgyptAir employees in America, who instantly established an 800 number for the family and friends of passengers, airline workers in Cairo appeared nearly as shocked and overwhelmed as the victims' families.

Sitting at tables holding copies of the flight's passenger list, airline workers struggled to calm emotional relatives. Some employees even offered hope that there might be survivors. It did little to ease the outcries of grief.

In a corner of Cairo's airport, a mother moaned her son's name: ``Wahid, Wahid.''

Outside the airport, hired drivers held up signs bearing the names of customers who would never come.

In New York, Rabbi Moses Birnbaum journeyed to the Ramada Plaza Hotel near Kennedy airport, where some 30 family members were sequestered behind closed doors, far from the reporters, TV crews and photographers who waited outside.

The people inside, Birnbaum said, ``are shell-shocked, and some of them are angry.'' But most were quiet, the rabbi said, ``and the pain is written on their faces.''

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