Egyptian pilot on doomed jet left Montreal for his passion JEFF HEINRICH The Gazette Monday, January 05, 2004 Ekram Hamid wishes his son, Ashraf, had taken his advice and not become a pilot like him. Maybe then he wouldn't be dead. "It's a sad day, it's unfortunate," Hamid, 70, who lives in Roxboro, said yesterday after learning his estranged son was among the 148 passengers and crew who died Saturday when a Paris-bound Egyptian charter jet crashed in the Red Sea shortly after takeoff from Cairo. "His passion was flying," said his father. "He loved to fly. I just wish he had chosen another career." Ashraf Hamid was a dual Egyptian-Canadian citizen in his early 40s. He had lived with his father in Montreal in his mid-teens and graduated from Riverdale High School in Pierrefonds before going back to Egypt to live with his mother and study to be a pilot. He was aboard Flash Airlines Flight FSH604 on Saturday - not piloting, but as part of a relief crew - when the 11-year-old Boeing 737 crashed in about 800 metres of water after leaving Sharm el-Shekh airport. Yesterday, a Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs official visited Hamid's two Canadian-born daughters in Brampton, Ont. to tell them their father died and that they had been named in his will, said the pilot's father. A department spokesperson would not confirm any details to The Gazette, including Ashraf Hamid's identity, saying only that one of the flight's victims was a dual Egyptian-Canadian crew member and that Ottawa intended to "locate and advise next of kin." Hamid senior, who emigrated to Canada in the 1960s after starting a career as a pilot with Egypt Air and now is vice-president of the Toronto brokerage firm Refco Canada, said his son had joined Flash Airlines only four months before in order to get certified on Boeing 737s. Before that, he'd worked for an aviation firm in the U.S. A tall, slim man, he had chosen flying out of conviction, his father said. "I was a pilot, his stepfather was a pilot, his half-brother is a pilot, so that's what he knew." Father and son hadn't spoken since the early 1990s, when they had a falling out. Ashraf had been born in an unhappy marriage - his parents were only married a year and were divorced soon after - and it was something he repeated in his own life. Besides his daughters, he leaves behind a son in Egypt from a second marriage. Yesterday, Hakim senior remembered Ashraf as a headstrong young man who valued aviation over family. "He was a bit of a rogue at the beginning. He worked in an electronics company and he left it to go into aviation, and I told him at the time, 'You're a father now, you have kids, you have responsibilities, instead of pursuing aviation you should pursue a career.'" But his love of flying outweighed his sense of responsibility as a father, Hakim said, and so he left Canada. The two men lost touch, and now that his son is dead, Hakim wonders what might have been. "We used to speak once in a while. He used to call me, but the last time I spoke to him was back in 1992," Hakim said. When a Foreign Affairs department official broke the bad news with a 7:30 a.m. phone call to his house yesterday, "that was the first I heard of him since then," he added. "Birthdays, Christmas, New Year's - all those years he never called, never sent a card. Now is not the time to be upset by that, but I'm still hurt." jheinrich@thegazette