The cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 804 has been found damaged, the Egyptian investigative committee said Thursday in a statement.
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Wreckage was found in several places.
The director of the BEA, France’s air accident investigation agency, later said it had confirmed the signals were from one of the recorders on the plane.
The recorder was retrieved in “several stages”, the committee said, and is now being transferred from the vessel, the John Lethbridge, which pulled it out, to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria.
The Airbus A320 vanished on May 19 with 66 people on board while en route between Paris to Cairo. Pieces of wreckage and human remains have already been recovered from the site.
The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds on the flight deck that can include conversations between pilots, warning alarms from the aircraft and background noise.
“The signal of a beacon from a flight recorder could be detected”.
Investigators hope the discovery of the flight recorder, which contains recordings from inside the cockpit, will shed light on why the plane came down.
Radar data showed the aircraft had been cruising normally in clear skies before it turned 90 degrees left, then a full 360 degrees to the right as it plummeted from 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) to 15,000 feet (4,572 meters).
The jet vanished from radar at 10,000 feet.
While speculation initially centred on a terror attack, a technical fault has also not been ruled out, with automated messages sent by the plane shortly before its demise indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit.
Once they’re found, the black boxes will be brought to Egypt, a civil aviation ministry official told CNN.
On Sunday, Egyptian investigators said time was running out in the search for the black boxes and that almost two weeks remain before the batteries on them expire and they stop emitting signals.
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Egypt’s aviation industry has been under global scrutiny since October 31, 2015, when a Russian Airbus A321 flying to St. Petersburg from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh crashed in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard. Russian Federation said the crash was caused by a bomb on the plane, and the local branch of the Islamic State claimed responsibility, citing Moscow’s involvement in Syria.
