President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said Sunday that underwater equipment from Egypt’s offshore oil industry was sent over to search for the black box recorders.
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Speaking at an event in Damietta on Sunday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi urged Egyptian and worldwide media to refrain from considering one scenario more likely than others regarding the cause of the plane crash. “So please, it is very important that we do not talk and say there is a specific scenario”, Mr Sisi said.
Later the same day, Egyptian state daily Al-Ahram reported that the plane’s black box had been “tentatively” detected in an area between three and four nautical miles from the site of the crash.
“We are looking into this report”, an Egyptian civil aviation ministry official told AFP.
Investigators are still trying to work out why Flight MS804 crashed as it flew from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle to Cairo Airport – killing 56 passengers, including Brit Richard Osman and 10 crew. The short range of the signal can make it hard to detect underwater, and the black boxes could be resting on the seabed at a depth of over 11,000 feet. MOD Egypt More debris collected by search teams.
However, Egyptian officials nearly immediately pointed to terrorism as a likely factor, suggesting the erratic turns the plane made before it disappeared off radar point to either a bomb or a struggle over the aircraft’s controls. “It has a submarine that can reach 3,000m under water”, he told officials gathered at the opening of a fertiliser plant in the port city of Damietta.
The navy was searching an area about 290km north of Alexandria, just south of where the signal from the plane was lost early on Thursday. The black box records all the plane and engines movements from when the plane is turned on until they’re off or until the plane crashes.
The Egyptian Armed Forces on Saturday morning released the first photos of debris from EgyptAir flight 804 recovered from the Mediterranean Sea.
“The authorities are now putting more emphasis on smoke alarm signals that have been received from the plane”.
A USA intelligence official told us the plane’s flight recorders have been approximately located via the electronic pings emitted by their beacon.
Sinai Province, a local affiliate of the Islamic State jihadist group, said it had smuggled a bomb on board.
He adds, “an engine fire could cause a crash but has not done so in the modern aviation era”.
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In the missing plane 30 Egyptian passengers were traveling, French were 15, a British, a Belgian, a Saudi Arabian, a Portuguese, an Algerian, a Sudanese, a Canadian, a Chadian, two Iraqis, and a Kuwaití. They included a boy and two babies.
