A French company has confirmed that its special undersea search ship has detected signals from one of the black box flight recorders on the EgyptAir flight that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea last month.

EgyptAir will contract two foreign firms, one French and one Italian, to help search for the black boxes of its plane that crashed in the Mediterranean, the airline’s chairman said.

Investigators in Moscow said they were unable to retrieve information from the damaged black box of a Russian warplane shot down by Turkey last month, data the Kremlin hoped would support its version of what happened.

Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency says it is still searching for one of the two “black boxes” from a passenger plane that crashed into a mountain over the weekend, killing all 54 people on board.

Data from the second black box found in the wreckage of the Germanwings flight that crashed last week in the French Alps appears to confirm that the co-pilot acted deliberately.

One of the pilots of the crashed Germanwings jet can be heard in a 'black box' recording leaving the cockpit, then banging on the door with increasing urgency in an unsuccessful attempt to get back in, a US newspaper report has suggested.

The black box has been recovered from the site of today's plane crash in the French Alps, a French interior ministry official has confirmed.