EgyptAir Flight MS804 crashed in the Mediterranean last Thursday between the Greek island of Crete and Egypt’s north coast with 66 people aboard, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French nationals.
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These are separate from the signals transmitted by the ELT, which sends a radio signal upon impact that is not created to continue emitting once the plane is submerged underwater, said a source familiar with the investigation.
Commander Benjamin Chauvet, a spokesman for the French navy, told reporters at a briefing in Paris that the first step must be to narrow the search zone before homing in on the black boxes.
The chief investigator, Ayman al-Moqadem, said late Thursday that Airbus had given Egyptian authorities information on the Emergency Locator Transmitter, or ELT, from the doomed aircraft.
France’s air accident investigation agency has said a French naval ship specialized in underwater searches will help search for the black boxes.
The plane has three of the transmitters – one of them in the tail near the “black box” flight data recorders.
The transmitter, picked up by satellites in the worldwide search-and-rescue network, turned out to be separate from the underwater locator beacons or “pingers” attached to the flight recorders.
The Laplace has left Porto Vecchio in Corsica and will arrive at the likely crash site over the weekend, deploying specialist technology to pick up telltale “pings” from the Airbus Group SE A320’s black-box flight recorders in waters thought to be more than 3,000 meters (9,850 feet) deep.
Relatives and friends of those aboard the EgyptAir jet that crashed await word outside the Egyptair in-flight service building at the airport in Cairo, Egypt on May 19. It is expecting France to hand over radar imagery and other data covering the plane’s time in French airspace and on the ground in Paris, he added.
“The device only operates when an aircraft strikes a hard object”, a source at the Egypt-led investigative committee said. During flight, it sent signals that at first showed the engines were functioning but then detected smoke and suggested an increase in temperature at the co-pilot’s window.
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So far, some debris from the plane – including life vests, personal belongings and parts of wreckage – has been recovered. A Cairo forensic team has received the human remains and is carrying DNA tests to identify the victims.
