Both black boxes from EgyptAir plane recovered
Print Edition
SEARCH teams recovered the second flight recorder of an EgyptAir plane from the bottom of the Mediterranean yesterday, a move could prove vital in establishing the cause of the crash.
Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo disappeared from radar screens in the eastern Mediterranean last month with 66 people on board, and a search operation has since scoured vast areas off Egypt’s northern coast.
Egyptian investigators said search teams managed to recover the Airbus A320’s flight data recorder — which gathers information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane — a day after they retrieved its cockpit voice recorder.
The data recorder, which experts see as a vital part of the investigation, was found in several pieces.
It was not immediately clear how much of its data would be usable, but Cairo’s civil aviation authority has said that salvage experts had managed to retrieve the voice recorder’s crucial memory unit despite damage to the black box.
“The flight data recorder was also retrieved in several stages but the vessel equipment managed to pick up the memory unit which is considered as the most important part,” France’s BEA air safety agency, which is assisting the probe, said.
The voice recorder was due to be transferred from the port city of Alexandria to Cairo, where Egyptian investigators supported by French experts and representatives of manufacturer Airbus will analyze its contents.
BEA said it had sent an expert to Cairo to assist.
The cockpit voice recorder keeps track of up to two hours of conversation and other sounds in the pilots’ cabin, but also ambient noise within the aircraft.
“Depending on what we can get from this black box, it could allow us to know exactly what happened,” said aeronautics expert Jean Serrat.
Search teams spent weeks scouring an area about 290 kilometers north of the Egyptian coast for the recorders.
The area where the plane crashed on May 19 is believed to be about 3,000 meters deep and there were fears the black box batteries — which normally last between four and five weeks — would run out before the recorders could be assessed.
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 Sinai Peninsula last October that killed all 224 people on board. Islamic State claimed responsibility for that attack within hours, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.
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