Cairo-The committee investigating the crash of the EgyptAir plane in the Mediterranean last month, while on route from Paris to Cairo, said that a vessel searching for the wreckage recovered on Thursday the cockpit voice recorder.
The Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee began inspecting the voice recorder, reviving hopes on resolving the mystery behind the plane’s crash.
Flight MS804 was heading from Charles De Gaulle Airport near the French capital Paris to Cairo on May 19 with 66 people, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French citizens, on board when it crashed.
Investigators have said it is too soon to determine what caused the plane to crash, although a terror attack has not been ruled out.
Committee sources said that the prosecutors would receive the device, which records the pilots’ conversations and other noises from the cockpit, and hand it over to the investigators to access and analyze the recordings.
They added that efforts are underway to move it from the ship to the city of Alexandria.
Committee sources confirmed to Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper that the cockpit recorder was found a day after officials said they had found the wreckage of the Airbus A320.
The committee has said that the second so-called black box will most likely stop sending signals on June 24 and that Egyptian and French boats are working round the clock to find them.
French search naval vessel, Laplace, and John Lethbridge, which is a ship that searches and recovers debris, are carrying out their mission in the wreckage area.
Investigators are putting together a map of the debris on the seabed. Such images will help investigators determine whether the plane broke apart in the air or stayed intact until it struck the water, aviation experts said.
However, a day after search teams found the 1st cockpit, the second flight recorder has been retrieved from the crashed EgyptAir flight MS804, containing data from aircraft systems which could shed light on what brought the plane down last month, Egyptian investigators said.