text: Egypt blames Istanbul control tower for accident . CAIRO 1996-08-22 The chairman of national carrier EgyptAir on Thursday blamed the control tower at Istanbul airport for the EgyptAir plane accident . Twenty people were injured on Wednesday when the EgyptAir Boeing 707 overshot the runway , caught fire , hit a taxi and skipped across a road onto a railway line . Chairman Mohamed Fahim Rayyan told a news conference at Cairo airport : " The control tower should have allocated the plane another runway , instead of the one the plane landed on . " " The one it landed on is 2,250 metres ( 2,460 yards ) long while the other one if more than 3,000 metres ( 3,300 yards ) long and is less steep , " he added . He said a Turkish civil aviation authority official had made the same point and he noted that a Turkish plane had a similar accident there in 1994 . The EgyptAir pilot blamed Turkish airport staff for misleading him . The landing took place after a rainstorm . " Its not an accident . It 's very wet . The brake action is very poor and the tower said it 's medium . That 's wrong , " the pilot told private Ihlas news agency in English .