The restoration of the black box comes as French authorities opened a manslaughter investigation into the crash on Monday, saying that there had yet been no clear evidence that an act of extremism had downed the plane.
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One of the two black box flight recorders from the EgyptAir plane that plunged into the Mediterranean last month has been repaired, Egypt’s investigation commission said Tuesday, prompting hopes it could provide clues on why the aircraft went down. A terror attack has not been ruled out.
A flight-data recorder will store technical parameters from the previous 25 hours of a plane’s operations.
The airliner’s two recorders – one containing flight data and the other voice recordings from the cockpit – were handed to French investigators after being recovered from the wreckage in the Mediterranean.
They were sent to France’s BEA air safety agency to be repaired, where they arrived on Monday. They will be sent back to a laboratory in Cairo to analyse the data once the repairs are completed.
Also on Monday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said it was opening an involuntary manslaughter investigation into the accident.
Fifteen of the passengers on board the doomed aircraft were from France. The Daesh extremist group, which operates in Sinai, claimed responsibility and published a photo of a soft drink can that it said had been filled with explosives and smuggled onto the flight.
Egyptian investigators have already determined the May 19 flight made a sharp left turn, followed by a 360-degree sweep to the right before plunging into the sea.
The repaired black boxes will be returned to Cairo for analysis in Egypt’s aviation ministry laboratories, the committee previously said.
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The Egyptian investigation committee is in charge of issuing a final report, but France can also investigate because the plane was manufactured by France-based Airbus and French citizens were among those killed.
