Cairo // In a breakthrough, searchers have recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the EgyptAir plane that crashed into the Mediterranean last month.
Although broken into pieces, salvage experts on Thursday managed to retrieve the recorder’s crucial memory unit in a major step towards establishing the cause of the tragedy.
Officials are preparing to transfer the recorder from a search vessel in the Mediterranean to Egypt for analysis, the Egyptian civil aviation authority said.
Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo crashed into the Mediterranean on May 19 killing all 66 people on board.
The cockpit voice recorder, which tracks conversations and other sounds in the pilots’ cabin, was found hours after a deep-sea robot located parts of the plane’s main body at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
Airbus said the flight recorders held the key to unlocking the mystery of why the plane went down nearly a month ago.
“The first photos of the wreckage do not allow to establish any scenario of the accident,” Airbus said.
“Only the black boxes could contribute to a full understanding of the chain of events which led to this tragic accident.”
Investigators have said it is too soon to determine what caused flight, although a terror attack has not been ruled out.
The search vessel John Lethbridge, equipped with an underwater robot, arrived in Egypt last week to begin searching an area around 290 kilometres north of the Egyptian coast.
The robot discovered pieces of the fuselage at several sites, the Egyptian board of inquiry said late Wednesday.
A source close to the investigation said that the robot, operated by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, had found “small fragments” of the plane.
Some wreckage had already been pulled out of the Mediterranean by search teams last month, along with belongings of passengers.
Search teams are still looking for the flight data recorder, which gathers information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane.
The area where the plane crashed is believed to be about 3,000 metres deep and the black boxes should have had enough battery power to emit signals for four to five weeks.
France’s aviation safety agency has said the EgyptAir plane transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before disappearing from radar screens.
On Monday, Egyptian investigators confirmed that the aircraft had made a 90-degree left turn followed by a 360-degree turn to the right before hitting the sea.
Investigators were able to narrow down the search site due to an emergency signal sent via satellite by the plane’s locator transmitter when it hit the Mediterranean.
There were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan on the doomed flight. They included a boy and two babies. Seven crew and three security personnel were also on board.
The crash came after the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula last October that killed all 224 people on board.
The ISIL extremist group claimed responsibility for that attack within hours, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.
ISIL has been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and has claimed attacks in both France and Egypt.
In October, foreign governments issued travel warnings for Egypt and demanded a review of security at its airports after ISIL said it downed the Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula with a bomb concealed in a soda can that had been smuggled onboard.
* Agence France-Presse