A French naval search vessel has picked up signals believed to originate from one of the black boxes of EgyptAir flight MS804 that crashed into the Mediterranean last month, the Egyptian investigation committee said on Wednesday.
It said in a statement the search for the black boxes was intensifying ahead of the expected arrival within a week of another vessel, the John Lethbridge, from Mauritius-based company Deep Ocean Search to help retrieve the devices, Reuters reported.
“Search equipment aboard French naval vessel Laplace ... has detected signals from the seabed of the search area, which likely belong to one of the data boxes,” the committee said.
Investigators are searching in some of the deepest waters of the Mediterranean for flight recorders from the Airbus A320 that crashed on May 19, killing 66 people.
The jet’s flight recorders or “black boxes” are designed to emit acoustic signals for 30 days after a crash, giving search teams fewer than three weeks to spot them in waters up to 3,000-meter deep, which is on the edge of their range.
