MS804’s voice recorder found
Print Edition
THE cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir flight MS804 has been retrieved by search teams in a breakthrough for investigators seeking to explain what caused the plane to crash into the sea killing all 66 people on board.
The Airbus A320 plunged into the Mediterranean on May 19 en route from Paris to Cairo.
Since then, search teams have worked against the clock to recover the two black box recorders crucial to explaining what went wrong.
Egypt’s investigation committee said in a statement that a specialist vessel owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search was forced to salvage the device in stages because it was extensively damaged, but was able to retrieve the memory unit.
“The vessel’s equipment was able to salvage the part that contains the memory unit, which is considered the most important part of the recording device,” the statement said.
Egypt’s public prosecutor ordered that the recovered device be handed over to Egyptian air accident investigators.
Two specialist vessels, John Lethbridge and Laplace, are continuing to search for the second black box, which contains the flight data recorder. They have yet to detect signals from that device but have identified the location of the main parts of the wreckage.
The black boxes are usually located in the tail, so finding the wreckage and one of the devices narrows the search.
The investigation committee said the black boxes were expected to stop emitting signals around June 24. That would make the second device hard to find because the plane crashed in some of the deepest waters of the Mediterranean, about 3,000 meters below the surface.
With only limited amounts of wreckage and human remains found before yesterday’s breakthrough, Egypt’s investigators have had little to go on.
On Monday, they said radar imagery from the Egyptian military confirmed previous reports indicating the plane had swerved sharply left, then spun 360 degrees to the right before disappearing from radar.
That conclusion goes some way to excluding the possibility the plane was brought down by an explosion.
No group has claimed responsibility, but investigation sources have said it is too early to rule out any explanation, including terrorism.
The crash was the third recent blow to Egypt’s travel industry.
A Russian plane crashed in the Sinai Peninsula last October, killing all 224 people on board in an attack claimed by Islamic State. In March, an EgyptAir plane was hijacked by a man wearing a fake suicide belt. No one was hurt.
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