French and Italian firms to help search for EgyptAir black boxes

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.

EgyptAir flight 804 crashed last Thursday with 66 people on board including 30 Egyptians and 15 from France in an area of the Mediterranean where the waters can be 3,000m deep.

“We have contracted a French and an Italian company to conduct deep sea searching in the Mediterranean, 3,000m deep,” Egypt-Air chairman Safwat Moslem told a news conference.

The plane and its black box recorders, which could explain what brought down the Paris-to-Cairo flight as it entered Egyptian air space, have not been located.

Investigators are looking for clues in the debris and human remains recovered so far from the Mediterranean.

The EgyptAir jet that crashed last week showed no technical problems before taking off according to an Aircraft Technical Log signed by its pilot Egypt’s state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram said.

It published a scan of the log on its website. The paper said Egypt-Air flight 804 transmitted 11 “electronic messages” on May 18, about three and a half hours before disappearing from radar screens with 66 passengers and crew on board.

The first two messages indicated the engines were functional. The third message came at 01.26 on May 19 and showed a rise in the temperature of the co-pilot’s window. The plane kept transmitting messages for the next three minutes before vanishing, Al-Ahram said.

Earlier, the head of Egypt’s forensics authority, dismissed as premature a suggestion that the small size of the body parts found since the Airbus 320 jet crashed indicated there had been an explosion on board.