Most of 1,400 on Doomed Ferry Feared Lost

From the main article:

The 35-year-old ship, Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98, went down 40 miles off the Egyptian port of Hurghada

From the photo caption:

vicinity of where the 25-year-old ship was last seen on the radar screens

Which is it?

Tragic. What a sad day for Egypt and the world.

From a CNN story:

The ship, which was built in 1970 and flies a Panamanian flag, was involved in a collision in 1999, he said.

The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.no says there were 1415 people on board on the ship.

No distress signal was received from the ferry, but at some point during the night it disappeared from radar screens, the control room official said.

This is downright eerie. No distress signal? It just disappeared? And they were only 40 miles away from the coast?

Even when RMS Titanic sank, the crew got a distress signal out, and that was almost 100 years ago. You'd think the methods of communication are much more advanced today than in the early 1900s.

You would think so.

I read earlier that the captain did tell a vessel headed the other direction that he was sinking.

My family is from Egypt and I have been several times in my life. It is a great country and everyone should get a chance to see it. Unfortunately, the country has had a lot of bad publicity(trains, boats, airplanes, terrorism) over the past years that few people venture over there.

I guess this would be the most tragic sinking since the Estonia went down in the Baltic Sea in 1995 with a loss of more than 800 souls. The trouble with roll-on roll-off (or ro-ro) vessels is that they they traditionally have a shallow hull which can make them top heavy and in some cases, depending on load, become candidates for capsizing. Unless this was some kind of terrorist action, which I doubt, the ship just went belly-up and then there is not much time to send May Day signals.