EgyptAir will contract two companies, one French and the other Italian, to help in the search for the black boxes of its plane that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, Egyptian state television said on Wednesday.
Egypt’s flag-carrier airline announced on Thursday that its Airbus A320-232 jetliner plunged into the Mediterranean en route from Paris to Cairo, and all 56 passengers and 10 crew members who were on board are believed to have been killed.
Egyptian naval sources are searching for the plane’s debris at sea, along with Greek, French and U.S. naval forces.
The Egyptian military said in statements on Friday that it discovered debris, personal belongings of passengers, luggage, aircraft seats, and body parts in the Mediterranean Sea, 290 km north of Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria.
The cause behind the crash remains unknown. The plane’s black boxes, pieces of equipment that record details about a flight and are believed to be key to pinpointing the cause of a crash, are yet to be retrieved.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Sunday that finding the black boxes is a priority for Egypt, and that an Egyptian robot submarine has been deployed in the Mediterranean for that purpose.
Urging journalists not to make speculations about the crash, Sisi said that “all scenarios are possible” and the investigation may take time.
The head of Egypt’s Air Accidents Investigation department, Ayman Moqadem was cited in Ahram on Monday as saying that efforts are underway to locate the two boxes guided by the last point at which the plane could be detected on the radar of Cairo’s Air Navigation Center after the plane entered Egyptian airspace.
The plane was last detected in an area where Egyptian and Greek airspaces overlap, Moqadem added.
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Credit: All Africa
