Ship detected signal from black box of EgyptAir jet

Cockpit recorders are crucial to learning cause of crash

CAIRO— A French ship searching the Mediterranean Sea has detected black-box signals from a missing EgyptAir flight in the waters between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast, a development that could help solve the mystery of why the aircraft crashed into the sea last month, killing all 66 on board.

The discovery, announced Wednesday, could help guide search teams to the wreckage and the flight’s data and cockpit voice recorders, which, if retrieved unharmed, could reveal whether a mechanical fault or a hijacking or bomb caused the disaster.

In the two weeks since Flight 804 disappeared from radar en route to Cairo from Paris, only small pieces of debris and human remains have been retrieved from the crash site. No terrorist group has claimed responsibility, though Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, has said terrorism is a more likely cause than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event.

The flight recorders will be critical to determining whether the disaster was caused by an accident or a deliberate act.

Equipped with sophisticated underwater sensors, the French naval vessel Laplace had been taking part in the search for the missing Airbus A320 since last week. On Wednesday, the Egyptian agency leading the inquiry into the crash said the ship had received signals “from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders.”

Hours later, the French company Alseamar confirmed that its equipment aboard the ship had detected signals from one of the black box recorders.