Crashed EgyptAir black box found

CAIRO, (AP): The cockpit voice recorder of the doomed EgyptAir plane that crashed last month killing all 66 people on board has been found and pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt's investigation committee said yesterday.

The development raises hopes that investigators can find clues as to the cause of the May 19 crash, which remains unclear. No terror group has claimed responsibility for bringing the plane down.

The Egyptian committee said the black box one of the two on board the plane has been damaged, but the vessel searching for the wreckage managed to safely recover the "memory unit, which is the most important in the recorder".

The recorder was retrieved in "several stages", the committee said, and is currently being transferred to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. Once on shore, it will be handed over to the members of the committee, who will unload and analyse the data.

The voice recorder should contain a record of the last 30 minutes in the cockpit, and is equipped to detect even loud breathing. Experts say that it takes nearly 48 hours to retrieve data from the recorder, unless it is damaged.

OBTAINED IMAGES

Yesterday's announcement comes a day after the committee said the vessel, John Lethbridge, which is operated by the Deep Ocean Search that was contracted by the Egyptian government to join the search for the plane debris and flight recorders, spotted and obtained images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was en route to Cairo from Paris when it crashed on May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.