The investigative committee responsible for investigating the EgyptAir plane crash has been unable to download the information held on the doomed plane’s black boxes and this has dashed hopes of reaching an explanation for the crash. Flight MS804 was flying from Paris to Cairo when it crashed into the sea on 19 May killing all 66 people on board. The committee therefore decided to seek the help of French experts who will remove the salt deposits on 200 electrical paths in the hope of restoring the data.

Hopes were raised after the Egyptian authorities announced that they had found the black box data from the doomed plane and it appeared that the investigative committee would be able to form a picture of what happened during flight MS804.

The committee said that due to the fact that the cockpit voice recorder that recorded cabin conversations and the flight data recorder of the A320 aircraft are damaged, they will be flown to Paris next week where salt from the devices will be removed and the French aviation accident investigation bureau will attempt to repair the damage. The recorders will then be returned to Cairo for data analysis, according to the Egyptian investigative committee.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian source said that the Egyptian investigative committee “may take several weeks to analyse the data from the plane’s black boxes”, and added that “the committee must remove the salt accumulation on more than 200 electrical paths, to ensure that the circuitry is functional so that the contents of the black boxes’ memory units can be read”.

The EgyptAir flight MS804 departed from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on the 19th of May and was heading towards the Egyptian capital Cairo when it crashed. All 66 people on board died, including 30 Egyptian nationals, 15 French nationals and a number of other people of different nationalities.