Officials on Wednesday, June 1, said that signals have been detected from one of the black boxes on the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month.
They were picked up by French vessel Laplace while it was searching the Mediterranean Sea, where the jet presumably crashed with 66 people on board on May 19. The plane was heading from Paris to Cairo.
The plane disappeared from Egyptian and Greek radar screens---apparently without sending out a distress call.
“The signal from a beacon from a flight recorder has been detected,” Remi Jouty of France’s Bureau of Investigations and Analysis told the BBC. A search area for the black box has been set up, he said.
A second French vessel is en route to take pictures and retrieve objects from the water.
Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said the French ship received the signals “overnight,” AP reported. The ship’s equipment found the “signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders,” the Egyptian statement read, according to France24.
Meanwhile, Shaker Kelada, an EgyptAir official who has carried out other investigations for the carrier, told AP that half “the job has been done now.” The next step would be to find the black boxes’ exact location and remove them from the sea.
“We have to find where the boxes are exactly and decide on how to pull them out,” he said.
Searcher teams may also have to deploy robots or submarines and “be extremely careful ... to avoid any possible damage,” he added.
Black boxes emit signals for 30 days after a crash.
Debris from the doomed EgyptAir plane has been recovered from the sea, about 180 miles north of Alexandria, Egypt.
