EgyptAir Enlists European Companies to Look for Black Boxes From Flight 804

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/world/middleeast/egyptair-flight-804.html

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CAIRO — Egypt has asked European companies to help search for the black boxes of an EgyptAir plane that crashed on May 19 in deep water in the Mediterranean Sea, the airline’s chairman said on Wednesday.

Nearly a week after EgyptAir Flight 804 crashed with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 from France, investigators have no clear picture of its final moments.

The EgyptAir chairman, Safwat Musallam, did not name the French and Italian companies involved but told a news conference they were able to carry out searches at a depth of 3,000 meters, or 3,280 yards.

The plane and its cockpit data and voice recorders, commonly known as the black boxes, which could explain what brought down the Paris-to-Cairo flight as it entered Egyptian airspace, have not been found.

The black boxes are believed to be lying in up to 3,000 meters of water, on the edge of the range for hearing and locating their signals .

Maritime search experts say acoustic hydrophones must be towed in the water at depths of up to 2,000 meters in order to have the best chance of picking up the signals.

Batteries powering the signals sent from the black boxes typically last only 30 days, but EgyptAir’s deputy chairman, Ahmed Adel, said the search would continue beyond then if necessary, using other means to locate the recorders.

“There are many examples in similar air accidents when 30 days passed without finding the box yet” these planes’ black boxes were found, he said.

Mr. Musallam said that the jet had shown no sign of technical problems before taking off from Paris. He said the Airbus 320 was given a regular check by an Egyptian engineer and two Egyptian technicians at the airport in Paris.

“The engineer and the pilot both signed the aircraft technical log, which stated that the check found that all the plane’s machines were safe,” he said.

With no flight recorders to check and only fragmentary data from a handful of fault messages registering smoke in the plane in the minutes before it crashed, investigators are also looking to debris and body parts for clues.

Hisham Abdelhamid, head of Egypt’s forensics authority, said it was too early to draw conclusions based on the examinations to date.