‘Mohamed was not an extremist...he was good pilot,’ says father of EgyptAir captain

He came from a family of pilots. One uncle was an air force captain. Two cousins, like him, flew for the national carrier, EgyptAir.

Mohamed Saeed Shokair died doing what he was born to do, family members said Sunday at a funeral service for the pilot of EgyptAir Flight 804, which crashed into the Mediterranean last week with 66 people on board.

“It was not a job; it was his passion,” Samir Shokair, a cousin, said outside the mosque in east Cairo where relatives gathered on a dry, windy evening to bid quiet farewells.

Like all the funerals held across Egypt this weekend for the crash victims, there was no body to bury. Only unidentified human remains and bits of debris have surfaced since the plane went down Thursday morning, confounding investigators and deepening the anguish of family members.

Authorities have dismissed theories that Shokair, 36, or his 24-year-old co-pilot brought the aircraft down intentionally — as happened with a 1999 EgyptAir flight that originated in Los Angeles and crashed into the waters off New England.

They have described Shokair as a respected veteran with more than 6,000 hours of flying time under his belt — one-third of that at the controls of an A320.