AIR Airbus SE

Egyptian search teams have detected an emergency signal from the wreckage of EgyptAir Flight 804 that could help them locate the aircraft's fuselage on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, the lead investigator into the disaster said Thursday.

The discovery of the signal is the biggest breakthrough yet for the Egypt-led search, which so far has been limited to recoveries of small pieces of debris and human remains. The Airbus Group SE A320 plane, bound from Paris to Cairo with 66 passengers and crew aboard, crashed last Thursday.

The investigator, Capt. Ayman Al Moqadem, told Egypt's flagship state newspaper Al Ahram that the detection of the signal by satellite narrowed the search zone for the main body of the plane to a radius of about 3 miles.

Egyptian officials had said their search was on a 40-mile radius of the Mediterranean.

Emergency locator transmitters similar to the one Egyptian searchers are said to have detected are radio beacons that send a signal to satellites, used to locate plane wreckage or ships in distress.

Passenger jets have emergency locator beacons on their fuselage, which differ from the underwater locator beacons attached to the Airbus A320's so-called black boxes, the cockpit voice and data recorders that typically provide the most comprehensive flight information. Mr. Moqadem said investigators haven't located the black boxes.

To aid in the search for the black boxes, Egyptian authorities have retained foreign companies who specialize in marine wreckage searches and whose equipment can survey the depths in the crash area, believed to be around 10,000 feet deep.

France has deployed a ship to the area carrying such instruments. Egypt said Sunday that it also had dispatched a remote-controlled submarine belonging to its petroleum ministry to aid in the search.

Finding the plane's wreckage will allow investigators to 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.

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. No possible cause for the crash has been ruled out, they have said.

Write to Tamer El-Ghobashy at tamer.el-ghobashy@wsj.com and Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 26, 2016 08:45 ET (12:45 GMT)

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