Search for missing plane narrows
Print Edition
THE search for the EgyptAir plane which crashed last week, killing all 66 people on board, narrowed to a 5-kilometer-wide area in the Mediterranean Sea, based on signals from the craft’s emergency beacon, Egypt’s chief investigator said.
Ayman al-Moqadem said Airbus had given Egyptian authorities information on the Emergency Locator Transmitter, or ELT, from the doomed aircraft.
An official from the Egyptian investigation team said the beacon information was from the day of the crash, May 19, and that no new signal had been found. An Airbus official said he was unaware of any ELT received or given to the Egyptians.
The ELT’s signal is too weak to transmit information from underwater, unlike the locator pings emitted by the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, or black boxes. Al-Moqadem stressed that the boxes have not been found but the search was now being conducted in the 5-kilometer area. He did not clarify how long the search had been narrowed to that area.
A French naval oceanographic research ship, Laplace, carrying a long-range acoustic system able to detect black box signals is on its way to the crash site, France’s air accident investigation agency, the BEA, said.
Eight days after the plane crashed off Egypt’s northern coast on a Paris to Cairo flight, the cause of the tragedy has still not been determined. Ships and planes from Egypt, Greece, France, the United States and other nations have been searching the Mediterranean north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria for the jet’s voice and flight data recorders, as well as more bodies and aircraft parts.
Small pieces of the wreckage and human remains have been recovered while the bulk of the plane and the bodies of the passengers are believed to be deep under the sea. A Cairo forensic team has received the human remains and is carrying out DNA tests to identify the victims.
Egypt’s civil aviation minister Sherif Fathi has said he believes terrorism is a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event. But no hard evidence has emerged, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet.
Earlier, leaked flight data indicated a sensor detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the plane’s cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.
The Laplace is carrying three detectors designed to detect and localize signals from the flight recorders, believed about 3,000 meters under water. The torpedo-shaped detectors can be lowered about a kilometer into the water to listen for signals up to 4 kilometers away.
France may also send an unmanned submarine and deep-sea retrieval equipment, the statement said.
The BEA is involved in the search because the crashed plane was an Airbus, manufactured in France.
Because of the difficulties in finding the black boxes, Egypt has contracted two foreign companies, Alseamar and Deep Ocean Research, to help locate the flight data recorders of the plane.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi also said earlier that a submarine would join the search for the plane’s data recorders.
However, al-Moqadem told reporters that the submarine is not equipped to detect signals from the black boxes.
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