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Egypt says signals picked up from doomed plane's black box

A French ship has picked up signals from deep under the Mediterranean Sea, presumed to be from one of the black boxes of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month, Egyptian officials said on Wednesday.

The development raised hopes the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as the black boxes, could be retrieved and shed light on the aircraft's tragic crash, that killed all 66 passengers and crew on board.

In Cairo, the Civil Aviation Ministry cited a statement from the committee investigating the crash as saying the vessel Laplace received the signals.

The French Navy confirmed the Laplace arrived on Tuesday in the search area and picked up the signals "overnight."The signals' frequencies could match with the frequencies of data recorders, a French Navy spokesman told The Associated Press.

The location and identification of the source of the signals have not been determined yet, he said, adding that the searches are still at an "early stage."

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't allowed to speak publicly on the issue.

Some passengers' belongings and parts of the wreck of EgyptAir flight MS804 that were found last month. Photo: Egyptian Armed Forces/Getty Images
Some passengers' belongings and parts of the wreck of EgyptAir flight MS804 that were found last month. Photo: Egyptian Armed Forces/Getty Images

Laplace's equipment picked up the "signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders," the Egyptian statement read.

It added that a second ship, John Lethbridge affiliated with the Deep Ocean Search firm, will join the search team later this week.

Locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as the black boxes, can be picked up from deep underwater.
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The Laplace is equipped with three detectors made by the Alseamar company designed to detect and localize signals from the flight recorders, which are believed to be at a depth of about 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) underwater.

By comparison, the wreck of the RMS Titanic is lying at a depth of about 3,800 meters (12,500 feet).

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."

Services have a;ready been held for many of the victims of crashed EgyptAir flight MS804. Photo: AP Photo/Amr Nabil
Services have a;ready been held for many of the victims of crashed EgyptAir flight MS804. Photo: AP Photo/Amr Nabil

Kelada said he was confident the boxes will be retrieved.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 had been cruising normally in clear skies on a nighttime flight from Paris to Cairo on May 19 when it suddenly lurched left, then right, spinning all the way around and plummeting 38,000 feet (11,582.4 meters) into the sea, Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said shortly after the crash.

However, the Egyptians refuted this, saying that the plane didn't swerve or lose altitude before it disappeared off radar. A distress signal was never issued, EgyptAir has said.

Since the crash, small pieces of the wreckage and human remains have been recovered while the bulk of the plane and the bodies of the passengers are believed to be deep under the sea.

A Cairo forensic team has received the human remains and is carrying DNA tests to identify the victims. The search has narrowed down to a 5-kilometer (3-mile) area in the Mediterranean.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.

"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, citing the 2009 Air France Flight 447 crash in the Atlantic Ocean, when black boxes were found two years later.

Nearly two weeks after the crash off Egypt's northern coast, the cause of the tragedy still has not been determined.

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.