There were 66 people on board flight MS804 when it crashed on 19 May while flying from Paris to Cairo.
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Egypt’s Ministry of Civil Aviation said the box, one of two on the plane, was found 13,000 ft deep into the ocean, partly broken but with its memory storage intact.
The voice recorder is crucial in the EgyptAir investigation because the crew didn’t issue any distress calls before the crash.
The Egyptian government contracted with Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search to send the ship John Lethbridge to the scene with a remote-controlled underwater vehicle capable of scouring the sea floor almost 2 miles deep.
Accordingly, the first images of the wreckage were provided to the investigation committee, the statement said.
Some small pieces of debris from the plane had previously been discovered by search crews, but the search continued for the bulk of the wreckage. There was still no indication that the potentially vital flight data and cockpit voice recorders – the so-called “black boxes” – had been found. No possible cause for the crash, including terrorism, has yet been ruled out. On June 1, the BEA statement claimed that the highly equipped ship, La Place had detected signals from the black box of the Airbus A320.
The committee had earlier confirmed reports from Greek authorities that the plane swerved to the left and then spun around rightwards in a circle immediately before crashing.
Data sent from the flight before its disappearance detected smoke on the plane and indicated the plane plummeted to 10,000 feet before vanishing from radar, the BBC reported.
The passengers included 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Canadians, two Iraqis and one each from Belgium, Britain, Algeria, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Portugal.
Security has also been considerably tightened at Egypt’s 20-plus airports since the Russian plane crash, with passengers now subjected to roughly the same security measures in force at major worldwide airports.
The crash occurred after the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula last October that killed all 224 people on board.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that attack within hours, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.
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IS has been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and has claimed attacks in both France and Egypt.
