Share

Egypt Sends Submarine to Find Missing Flight MS804’s Black Boxes

The president said it would take time for investigators to figure out the cause of the crash.

Advertisement

“All assumptions are possible”, Sisi said in a televised speech during an inauguration ceremony of a petrochemical project in Damietta governorate. “So please, it is very important that we do not talk and say there is a specific scenario”, he added.

On Friday, search teams found wreckage including seats and luggage about 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt’s military said.

Sisi said that underwater equipment from Egypt’s offshore oil industry was being brought in to help the search.

The Egyptian military released images on Saturday of life vests, personal items and debris showing the EgyptAir logo which were found during the search in the Mediterranean Sea.

On Saturday, France’s BEA air accident investigation agency told the media that smoke was reportedly detected on board the EgyptAir plane before it crashed in the southern Mediterranean.

Still missing are the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, sometimes called the “black boxes”.

The Airbus A320 had been cruising normally in clear skies on a nighttime flight to Cairo early Thursday when it suddenly lurched left, then right, spun all the way around and plummeted 38,000 feet into the sea, never issuing a distress signal.

The recovery of the black boxes is crucial to finding out what happened in the fateful moments before the plane crashed.

Egypt’s aviation minister has said a terrorist attack was a more likely cause than technical failure for the crash. “It says we have more questions than we have answers”.

Investigators have been poring over the plane’s passenger list and questioning ground crew at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, where the airplane took off. That’s in contrast to when the Islamic State claimed responsibility for downing a Russian jet over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula just hours after it crashed, killed 224 people.

While there were suspicions it could be a terror attack by Islamist militants who blew up another airliner over Egypt previous year, no one has yet claimed responsibility for the EgyptAir flight that went missing with 56 passengers and 10 crew on board.

Advertisement

According to the airline, 30 Egyptians and 15 French – along with two Iraqis, one Briton, one Belgian, one Portuguese, one Algerian, one Chadian, one Canadian, one Sudanese, one Kuwaiti and one Saudi national – had been aboard the ill-fated aircraft.

U.S. Navy LT. JG Dylon Porlas uses binoculars to look through the window of a U.S. Navy Lockheed P-3C Orion patrol aircraft from Sigonella Sicily Sunday M