The device was found broken into pieces but the
salvage experts managed to retrieve the recorder’s
crucial memory unit, Egypt’s civil aviation authority
said.
salvage experts managed to retrieve the recorder’s
crucial memory unit, Egypt’s civil aviation authority
said.
Officials are preparing to transfer the recorder from
a search vessel to the city of Alexandria on Egypt’s
Mediterranean coast for analysis, a statement said.
The cockpit voice recorder keeps track of up to
two hours of conversations and other sounds in the
pilots’ cabin.
Upon arriving in Egypt, the prosecutors would
receive the device and hand it over to the
investigators to access and analyse the recordings,
the authority said in the statement.
The breakthrough came hours after a deep-sea
robot located pieces of the main body of the
Airbus A320 at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
An investigator from France’s BEA air safety agency
is to travel to Cairo on Friday to offer “technical
expertise on taking readings from the recorder,” the
agency said.
Airbus said the flight recorders held the key to
unlocking the mystery of why the plane went down
with 66 people on board en route from Paris to
Cairo nearly a month ago.
“The first photos of the wreckage do not allow to
establish any scenario of the accident,” an Airbus
statement said.
“Only the black boxes could contribute to a full
understanding of the chain of events which led to
this tragic accident.”
Investigators have said it is too soon to determine
what caused the plane operating flight MS804 to
crash on May 19, although a terror attack has not
been ruled out.
The search vessel John Lethbridge, equipped with
an underwater robot, arrived in Egypt last week to
begin searching an area about 290 kilometres (180
miles) north of the Egyptian coast.
The robot discovered pieces of the fuselage at
“several sites”, the Egyptian board of inquiry said.
A source close to the investigation told AFP the
robot, operated by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean
Search, had found “small fragments” of the plane.
Some wreckage had already been pulled out of the
Mediterranean by search teams last month, along
with belongings of passengers.
– Limited battery life –
Search teams are still looking for the flight data
recorder, which gathers information about the
speed, altitude and direction of the plane.
The area where the plane crashed is believed to be
about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) deep and the
black boxes should have had enough battery power
to emit signals for four to five weeks.
France’s aviation safety agency has said the
EgyptAir plane transmitted automated messages
indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the
flight control unit minutes before disappearing from
radar screens.
On Monday, Egyptian investigators confirmed the
aircraft had made a 90-degree left turn followed by
a 360-degree turn to the right before hitting the
sea.
Investigators were able to narrow down the search
site thanks to an emergency signal sent via satellite
by the plane’s locator transmitter when it hit the
Mediterranean.
The passengers on the plane were 30 Egyptians, 15
French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and
citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad,
Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. They included a
boy and two babies.
Seven crew and three security personnel were also
on board.
The crash came after the bombing of a Russian
airliner over Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula last
October that killed all 224 people on board.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for
that attack within hours, but there has been no such
claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.
IS has been waging a deadly insurgency against
Egyptian security forces and has claimed attacks in
both France and Egypt.
In October, foreign governments issued travel
warnings for Egypt and demanded a review of
security at its airports after IS said it downed the
Russian airliner over the Sinai with a bomb
concealed in a soda can that had been smuggled
onboard.
