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1st LD: Black box of crashed EgyptAir flight confirms smoke on board

Xinhua, June 30, 2016 Adjust font size:

The initial data of one of the black boxes of EgyptAir flight that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea last month confirmed there was smoke on board, the Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee said in a statement Wednesday.

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) have recently been sent to Paris for repairs and Cairo received the fixed FDR Tuesday while repairing the CVR is still in progress.

"Recorded data is showing a consistency with ACARS messages of lavatory smoke and avionics smoke," the Egyptian committee said in the statement.

EgyptAir Flight MS804, an Airbus A320, went missing from radar screens on May 19 en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French.

"Following the successful download of the data of the FDR of the doomed A320, decoding and validation of more than 1,200 parameter is in progress in order to commence the next phase of reading and analyzing the data," the statement pointed out.

A few days after the plane went missing on May 19, the Egyptian military said it found some personal belongings of the victims and small pieces of the plane wreckage in the Mediterranean Sea 290 km north of the coastal city of Alexandria.

Later on, the Egyptian government hired French vessel John Lethbridge for deep underwater search and the vessel managed to locate several spots of the wreckage of the doomed and eventually found the two black boxes but they were damaged.

"Some recovered wreckage parts of the front section of the aircraft showed signs of high temperature damage and soot," said the committee's statement.

The investigators said an analysis will be carried out to try to identify the source and reason for those signs.

"Regarding the CVR, repairs are still under progress at the French aircraft accident investigation bureau," the statement continued.

The reason for the tragic fall of EgyptAir Flight MS804 is still unknown with all possibilities on the table, including a severe technical failure and a terrorist bomb, yet without a strong clue for any. Endit