French vessel “La Place”, which is participating in the search for the plane, has picked up signal coming from deep in the sea and believed to be from one of the black boxes of the plane, an Egyptian committee investigating the crash said in a statement.
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“A signal from a flight recorder has been detected”, a spokesperson for the BEA agency said, referring to the hunt for the missing aircraft in deep waters between the Greek island of Crete and the northern Egyptian coast.
A French vessel, the Laplace, picked up the signals in the course of an ongoing search in the eastern Mediterranean.
Another vessel sent by Deep Ocean Search (DOS), a private company hired to help find the black boxes, is on its way to the area carrying a ship with a robot capable of diving up to 3,000 metres to retrieve the recorders.
Both the French and Egyptian authorities have since launched investigations to determine the cause of the crash, which remains unknown until now.
Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s aviation minister, said last month that terrorism was a more likely cause for the plane’s disappearance.
Greece’s lead air accident investigator Athanasios Binis said items including lifejackets found near Karpathos were not from the Airbus A320.
“Hopefully they have finally got the right beacon, the right location, and soon we’ll have answers”, she said.
The Laplace arrived in the crash zone on Tuesday to join the search for wreckage and the black boxes.
The plane went missing on May 19, en route from Paris to Cairo, without sending a distress signal.
Leaked data has indicated a sensor had detected smoke in a toilet and a fault in two of the plane’s cockpit windows in the last moments of the flight.
Tarek Zaki, head of security at Cairo airport, said the warning claimed an unidentified assailant had planted a bomb on the plane.
The data recorders have been fixtures on commercial flights around the world for decades.
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That crash claimed by the Islamic State’s affiliate in Sinai and blamed by Moscow on an explosive device planted on board decimated Egypt’s lucrative tourism industry, which had already been battered by years of turmoil in the country.
