AIR Airbus SE

By Robert Wall 

LONDON--France has sent a specially-equipped naval vessel to the southeastern Mediterranean to help hunt for EgyptAir Flight 804's so-called black boxes, French air accident investigators said.

The French navy's Laplace survey ship left the Corsican town of Porto Vecchio Thursday headed for the suspected crash site of the Airbus Group SE A320 plane, which crashed more than a week ago with 66 passengers and crew on board.

Its search will begin in a matter of days, the French air accident investigation office, the BEA, said late Thursday, adding that two of its investigators were on board the vessel. The BEA, which is supporting the Egyptian-led crash probe, has extensive experience with underwater searches.

The BEA said another ship with an underwater exploration robot to recover items resting on the seabed may also be dispatched to assist in the search.

The black boxes are equipped with underwater beacons to help search teams find the cockpit voice and flight data recorders. The Laplace is carrying three hydrophones to help detect the signal, the BEA said.

The hydrophones can be dropped to a depth of 3,280 feet and detect a signal from the black box "pingers" at a range of 2.5 miles, according to Alseamar, the French manufacturer of the hydrophones.

The black boxes would provide the best clues what to cause the plane suddenly to plunge into the ocean from an altitude of 37,000 feet as it flew to Cairo from Paris.

The duration of the search operations will depend on weather conditions and the size of the area to be surveyed, the company said Friday.

Egyptian officials said Thursday that search teams had detected an emergency signal from the wreckage of the aircraft's fuselage, a discovery that has enabled searchers to narrow the search zone for the main body of the plane to a radius of about 3 miles.

No possible cause for the crash has been ruled out, Egyptian officials leading the crash probe have said.

Investigators so far have been forced to work with limited and inconclusive information. Egyptian investigators said Tuesday that some of the Flight 804 wreckage already found had been sent to a forensic lab for analysis, along with small fragments of human remains for possible identification using DNA.

Flight 804 transmitted a small number of automated fault messages shortly before all communication with the plane was lost. That information suggested possible smoke on the plane.

With only a limited number of such messages in hand, investigators have said they have drawn no conclusions about what happened to the Airbus A320, underscoring the importance of recovering the black boxes.

Egyptian search teams have yet to locate the fuselage and other main parts of the aircraft. The French navy also has had another ship in the area aiding the search for plane debris.

Locating the main body of wreckage would help investigators to identify the nature of the damage to the plane and glean information about how it crashed. Deformed metal can give clues on whether a plane broke up midflight or landed in the sea intact, according to air accident experts. It can also point to signs that explosives were used.

Write to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 27, 2016 07:19 ET (11:19 GMT)

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