Egypt: Signal heard from downed jet's black boxes
A French navy ship searching for the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month picked up signals deep in the Mediterranean Sea thought to be from the black boxes of the doomed Airbus A320, Egypt's Civil Aviation Ministry said Wednesday.
EgyptAir Fight 804 went down May 19 en route from Paris to Cairo, killing all 66 passengers and crew on board.
Radar tracking showed the plane turned abruptly and sharply at 38,000 feet before plummeting into the sea.
The cause for the crash is not determined and no militant group has claimed responsibility for bringing down the aircraft. However, Egypt’s civil aviation minister Sherif Fathi has said he believes terrorism is a more likely explanation than equipment failure.
The ministry on Wednesday cited a statement by the committee investigating the crash that said equipment aboard the vessel Laplace picked up the signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders. It did not say when the signals were detected.
The French Navy said its ship arrived Tuesday in the search area, the Associated Press reported.
A second ship, the John Lethbridge, which is affiliated with the Deep Ocean Search firm, will join the search team later this week to retrieve the devices if they are found.
The search for the jet focused on the eastern Mediterranean after European and U.S. satellites picked up distress signals from the ill-fated flight after it dropped off radar. Although small pieces of wreckage have been recovered, the critical, so-called black boxes, which are actually fluorescent orange, remain elusive.
Shaker Kelada, an EgyptAir official who has led other crash investigations for the carrier, told the AP that half “the job has been done now” and that the next step would be to determine the black boxers’ exact location and extract them from the sea.
“We have to find where the boxes are exactly and decide on how to pull them out,” he said, adding that search teams might need to send in robots or submarines and “be extremely careful ... to avoid any possible damage.”
David Learmount, a consulting editor at the aviation news website Flightglobal, said the black boxes’ batteries can transmit signals up to 30 days after the crash. But even if the batteries expire, locating the boxes remains a possibility.
In 2011, searchers found the data recorders from an Air France Rio to Paris flight that mysteriously crashed over the Atlanta 23 months earlier. They were found on the ocean floor of the coast of Brazil.
“It’s terribly important to find the black boxes, because if they don’t find them, they will know nothing about the aircraft,” he said, the AP reported.