A French search vessel picked up signals from one of the black boxes of the EgyptAir flight that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea last month, killing all 66 people on board, authorities said Wednesday.

The ship identified signals from one of EgyptAir Flight 804’s two black boxes, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, while combing the search zone between the Greek island of Crete and Egypt’s northern coast, France’s air accident investigation bureau, BEA, announced.

Identifying the signals was an important step toward finding the missing plane and solving the mystery of why it crashed, officials said.

EgyptAir Flight 804 was cruising at 37,000 feet when it disappeared off radar screens en route from Paris to Cairo in the early hours of May 19.


Wreckage from the aircraft and human remains have been recovered from the sea.

The search was being carried out with “direct coordination with the Egyptian authorities … following analysis of the available radar data,” BEA director Rémi Jouty said in a statement.

The investigation bureau confirmed a statement earlier in the day by Egyptian authorities.

The Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee said the ship Laplace had identified signals believed to have come from the flight recorders, which emit acoustic signals for around 30 days after a crash.


Laplace is carrying equipment made by Alseamar, which said in a statement that the ship started searching for signals at midday local time Tuesday.

The Egyptian statement said “extensive search efforts” to locate the two recorders were continuing. A recovery vessel, the John Lethbridge, belonging to the Mauritius-based company Deep Ocean Search, is expected to arrive in the area within a week with equipment capable of bringing the flight recorders to the surface in waters that are reportedly up to 9,840 feet deep.

Egyptian investigators say the plane showed no technical problems before taking off from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport and the crew made no distress call.

However, automatic messages transmitted from the aircraft to technicians on the ground showed an unusual rise in temperature of the cockpit window as well as smoke in the cabin and the flight control electronic unit shortly before contact with the plane was lost, investigators say.


Shaker Kelada, an EgyptAir official who has led other crash investigations for the carrier, told the Associated Press that identifying the signals meant half “the job has been done now.” The next step would be to determine the exact location of the black boxes and extract them from the sea, he said.

Search teams might need to send in robots or submarines and “be extremely careful to avoid any possible damage,” he said.

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Willsher is a special correspondent.


UPDATES:

1:02 p.m.: This article has been updated with Times reporting.

9:32 a.m.: This article has been updated with a statement from French company Alseamar confirming signals detected were from the EgyptAir plane.


7:37 am.: This article has been updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 4:02 a.m.