Egypt’s investigation committee today said the cockpit voice recorder has been retrieved.
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Authorities are considering the possibility the aircraft was brought down in an act of terrorism, but the official cause of the incident has not been determined.
Investigators say the flight recordings held on the black boxes will help to explain why EgyptAir Flight MS804 crashed on May 19, killing all 66 people on board.
The voice recorder was damaged but its memory unit, considered to be its most important component, was successfully retrieved, CNN reported Thursday, citing an Egyptian committee that is investigating the plane crash. Investigators are hoping the voice recorder will shed light on what, exactly, happened.
The cause of the disaster remains a mystery and no terror group has claimed responsibility.
Investigators first learned the location of the voice recorder two weeks ago when its battery-powered signals were detected by sonars mounted on the Laplace, a French naval vessel.
It has been taken to the city of Alexandria to be interrogated by the technical investigation committee.
It said in a statement that a specialist vessel owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search had, however, been able to recover the memory unit from the so-called black box.
A deep sea robot being lowered into the sea from the search vessel John Lethbridge.
The crew on board do not appear to have sent a distress call.
Nevertheless, even in the absence of the data from the flight recorders, air accident experts have said that the distribution of the wreckage would yield significant clues. The radar showed that the doomed aircraft turned 90 degrees left, then a full 360 degrees to the right, plummeting from 38,000 feet (11,582 metres) to 15,000 feet (4,572 metres) before disappearing at about 10,000 feet (3,048 metres).
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And in a recent statement, Egyptian investigators announced that they have found wreckage from the missing EgyptAir plane. One experienced investigator who worked on the Lockerbie bombing told me bomb damage looks very different to fire damage.
