Small pieces of the wreckage and human remains have been recovered while the bulk of the plane and the bodies of the passengers are believed to be deep under the sea.
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An official from the Egyptian investigation team on Friday clarified that the beacon information was from the day of the crash, May 19, and that no new signal had been found. An Airbus official said he was unaware of any ELT received or given to the Egyptians.
Sources in the investigation committee have said the EgyptAir jet did not show technical problems before taking off from Paris.
A week after the Airbus A320 crashed with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 from France, investigators have no clear picture of its final moments. Flight recorder beacons are typically created to transmit for at least 30 days on a frequency of 37.5kHz – although these criteria are being modified following difficulties encountered in previous underwater searches.
Naval survey vessel equipped with deep-water devices headed for search zone in eastern Mediterranean Sea, officials say. It did not specify when it would join the search. Ships and planes from Egypt, Greece, France, the United States and other nations are searching the Mediterranean Sea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria for the jet’s voice and flight data recorders.
A French official said the vessel would arrive on Sunday or Monday.
The French vessel will conduct a deepwater search in “four or five” areas within the 5 km search zone believed to contain the two black boxes, with the possibility of expanding the zone should nothing be detected, said another of the sources.
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France and Egypt will share the costs for the search, which faces a race against the clock, as the flight data and voice recorders emit locator “pings” for no more than about a month. How the robot submarine is going to aid in this search remains unclear, although with the given success of robots in nearly every industry in the world, there might be hope for those who must cling to it.
