Searchers scramble to find jet data boxes in the sea

PARIS — A French naval vessel fitted with underwater sensors raced Friday toward the eastern Mediterranean Sea, as the window for locating the so-called black boxes of a downed Egyptian airliner rapidly closed.

The ship is expected to arrive in the search zone early next week to help locate and recover the EgyptAir jet’s cockpit voice and data recorders. The recorders, commonly called black boxes, are likely to contain the only definitive evidence about the cause of the May 19 disaster, which killed all 66 people on board.

As time elapses, the need to find the recorders takes on increased urgency. The battery-powered beacons are certified to emit a distinct “ping” for roughly 30 days, meaning the EgyptAir jet’s black boxes are likely to fall silent by the middle of June.

“For the sake of the flying public and the aircraft industry, we need to get equipment in the water to find out what happened,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who helped lead a two-year search in the Atlantic Ocean for the wreck of an Air France jet that crashed in 2009.

Capt. Didier Piaton, a spokesman for the French navy, said Friday that the survey ship Laplace was en route from Porto Vecchio, Corsica, and was likely to arrive in the search zone north of Alexandria, Egypt, by Sunday or Monday.

A steady drip of incomplete and often contradictory reports about various signals and scraps of data that Egyptian officials may have received from the missing plane, an Airbus A320, has led to confusion and undermined international confidence in the investigation.

Neither Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Moqadem, nor its aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, responded to repeated queries on Friday for clarification about news reports that an emergency radio signal from the plane had been picked up by a satellite.

The only confirmed data from the jet were seven automated messages sent to an EgyptAir maintenance base in the minutes before the flight vanished from radar en route to Cairo from Paris. Those signaled the opening of a cockpit window and two smoke alerts.