Air-crash investigators said the cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 804 has been retrieved from the eastern Mediterranean, four weeks after the jet disappeared from radar screens with 66 people on board.
The so-called black box was damaged but its memory unit is intact, Egypt’s Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a statement Thursday. The recovery effort was led by the search vessel John Lethbridge, which had been drafted in to scour an area of seabed for the Airbus Group A320’s remains.
Finding the plane’s voice- and flight-data recorders has been viewed as an essential step in revealing why it crashed en route to Cairo from Paris on May 19. While pings from the black boxes were detected two weeks ago, the transmitters had battery power to last only until about June 24.
Egypt announced the retrieval of the voice recorder less than a day after revealing that the debris field from Flight MS804 had been discovered, and that the area would be mapped to determine how best to deal with the wreckage.
The John Lethbridge, hired from Deep Ocean Search Ltd., carries scanning sonars and a remotely-operated vehicle equipped with high-resolution cameras that work at depths of up to 20,000 feet. The vessel can also be fitted with manipulator arms to aid salvage efforts.
The black-box pings were detected by the French Navy survey vessel Laplace using torpedo-shaped Detector 6000 listening systems from Paris-based search specialist Alcen, which are dragged beneath the ship and can “hear” signals from 3 miles away.
Previous attempts to find the jet with a submarine were hampered by an ill-defined search area and waters thought to be more than 3,000 meters deep.
While Egypt is leading the crash probe, the BEA, France’s air-accident investigator, is likely to play a key role in analyzing the flight recorders, given its expertise involving jets built by Toulouse-based Airbus. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board also joined the investigation this month.
Experts remain unclear about what destroyed the A320. While human remains found earlier indicate a catastrophic incident such as a bomb, bodies can be ripped apart when a jet suffers a structural failure, or hits the ground or sea.
A string of error messages sent automatically minutes before the A320 disappeared indicate that smoke had been detected beneath the cockpit and in a lavatory, and that windows next to the co-pilot’s seat may have been broken, together with unspecified issues with flight computers.
While those readings might be explained in terms of a bomb blast, they could equally have resulted from a fire and associated electrical failure. Radar images suggest the plane also veered sharply left and then circled right before plunging into the sea.
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