Cockpit voice recorder from missing EgyptAir flight retrieved, but damaged

Egypt on Wednesday said that it spotted and obtained images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane that crashed into the Mediterranean last month, killing all 66 people on board, according to a statement by the country's investigation committee.

The cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir flight MS804 was found by search teams who were forced to salvage the device over several stages as it was damaged, the Egyptian investigation committee said on Thursday.

It said in a statement that a specialist vessel owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search had been able to recover the memory unit from the so-called black box.

The committee said that the vessel John Lethbridge, which was contracted by the Egyptian government to join the search for the plane debris and flight data recorders, "had identified several main locations of the wreckage." It added that it obtained images of the wreckage located between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.

The next step, the committee said, will be drawing a map showing the wreckage location.

The 75-meter-long survey vessel is equipped with sonar and other equipment capable of detecting wreckage at depths up to 1,830 meters.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 en route to Cairo from Paris had been cruising normally in clear skies on an overnight flight on May 19. The radar showed that the doomed aircraft turned 90 degrees left, then a full 360 degrees to the right, plummeting from 11,582 meters to 4,572 meters before disappearing at about 3,048 meters.

Leaked flight data indicated a sensor detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the plane's cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.

The cause of the crash still has not been determined. Ships and planes from Egypt, Greece, France, the United States and other nations had been searching the Mediterranean Sea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria for the jet's voice and flight data recorders, as well as more bodies and parts of the aircraft.

Only small pieces of wreckage and human remains had been recovered in a search that had been narrowed down to five-kilometer area of the Mediterranean.

Egypt's civil aviation minister Sherif Fathi has said he believes terrorism is a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event. But no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet.

Thursday's announcement came nearly two weeks after the French ship Laplace detected black box signals from the missing plane.

Ten days later, Egyptian investigators said that time was running out in the search for the black boxes.

Locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders can be picked up from deep underwater. The Laplace is equipped with three detectors designed to pick up those signals, which in the case of the EgyptAir plane are believed to be at a depth of some 3,000 meters. By comparison, the wreckage of the Titanic is lying at a depth of some 3,800 meters.

The black boxes could reveal whether a mechanical fault, a hijacking or a bomb caused the disaster.

(China Daily 06/17/2016 page11)