Since then, search teams have worked against the clock to locate the wreckage and recover the two black box recorders crucial to explaining what went wrong, before they stop emitting signals in about a week.
Advertisement
An Egyptian aviation ministry source, who declined to be named, said that if the voice data was heavily damaged, it could be sent overseas for further analysis. The statement added that the vessel, which joined the search team last week, succeeded in pulling out the memory unit which is the most important part in the recorder although it (the recorder) was damaged.
The device, which records the pilots’ conversations and other noises from the cockpit, has been taken to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, where it will be turned over to investigators for analysis.
The Egyptian investigation committee said in a statement on Friday that the data recorder had been “retrieved in several pieces” by one of the specialist vessels searching for the wreckage, which was located on Wednesday.
The news comes a day after search teams recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the wreckage of Flight MS804.
Both recorders are typically installed in an aircraft’s tail.
The EgyptAir plane had crashed and plunged in the Mediterranean last month with 66 passengers on board. No Americans were on board the flight, which has yielded up the voice recorder, but Canadians Marwa Hamdy, 42, of Saskatoon, and Medhat Tanious, 54, of Toronto, were among the lost passengers.
The cause of the crash remains a mystery.
The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was en route to Cairo from Paris when it crashed on May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.
Investigators have repeatedly said it is too soon to determine what caused the disaster, but a terror attack has not been ruled out.
Advertisement
Egypt’s aviation industry has been under global scrutiny since October 31, 2015, when a Russian Airbus A321 flying to St. Petersburg, Russia, from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh crashed in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard.
