French detect pings from lost jet

Sea search in EgyptAir crash keys on black boxes’ recovery

CAIRO — French officials confirmed Wednesday that signals from deep in the Mediterranean Sea have been detected from one of the flight recorders from the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month, killing all 66 passengers and crew on board.

“A signal from a tag of a flight recorder was able to be detected,” Remi Jouty, the head of France’s Bureau of Investigation and Analysis, said in a statement. Because the flight originated in Paris, French officials have been assisting in the investigation.

The development raised hopes the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as the black boxes, could be retrieved and shed light on the aircraft’s crash.

In Cairo, the Civil Aviation Ministry cited a statement from the committee investigating the crash as saying the vessel Laplace received the signals. The French navy confirmed the Laplace arrived Tuesday in the search area and picked up the signals “overnight.”

The signals’ frequencies could match with the frequencies of data recorders, a French navy spokesman said. The location and identification of the source of the signals have not been determined yet, he said, adding that the searches are still at an “early stage.” He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to speak publicly on the matter.

The Laplace’s equipment picked up the “signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders,” the Egyptian statement read. It added that a second ship, the John Lethbridge affiliated with the Deep Ocean Search company, will join the search team later this week.

Locator pings emitted by the black boxes can be picked up from deep under the water. The Laplace is equipped with three detectors made by the Alseamar company designed to recognize and localize signals from the flight recorders, which are believed to be at a depth of about 9,850 feet.

Shaker Kelada, an EgyptAir official who has led other crash investigations for the carrier, said half “the job has been done now” and the next step would be to determine the black boxers’ exact location and extract them from the sea.

“We have to find where the boxes are exactly and decide on how to pull them out,” he said, adding that search teams might need to send in robots or submarines and “be extremely careful … to avoid any possible damage.”

A second French ship, equipped to retrieve objects from the sea, is on the way to the area.

Kelada said he was confident the boxes will be retrieved. He investigated the Flash Airlines Flight 604 accident in 2004, when the aircraft crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 148 passengers, most of them French tourists, and crew on board.

In the May 19 crash, the EgyptAir Airbus A320 had been cruising normally in clear skies on a nighttime flight to from Paris to Cairo when it suddenly lurched left, then right, spinning all the way around and plummeting 38,000 feet into the sea, according to Greek officials. A distress signal was never issued, EgyptAir has said.

Since the crash, small pieces of the wreckage and human remains have been recovered but the bulk of the plane and the bodies of the passengers are believed to be deep under the sea. A Cairo forensic team received the human remains and is carrying out DNA tests to identify the victims. The search has been narrowed to a 3-mile area in the Mediterranean.

David Learmount, a consulting editor at the aviation news website Flightglobal, said the black boxes’ batteries can transmit signals up to 30 days after a crash. But even if the batteries expire, locating the boxes remains a possibility.

“It’s terribly important to find the black boxes, because if they don’t find them, they will know nothing about the aircraft,” he said, and cited the 2009 Air France Flight 447 crash in the Atlantic Ocean, when black boxes were found two years later.

Nearly two weeks after the crash off Egypt’s northern coast, the cause of the tragedy still has not been determined. Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, has said he believes terrorism is a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event.

But no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet. Earlier, leaked flight data indicated a sensor had detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the plane’s cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.