Stephane Dzioba, SIRPA Marine, AFP | French Navy patroller the EV Jacoubet leaves Toulon on May 20 to take part in the search operation for the missing EgyptAir plane.

A French naval vessel was en route to the eastern Mediterranean on Thursday to join the hunt for black boxes from a crashed EgyptAir jet, equipped with three specialist probes from a French company recruited to accelerate the search.

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The French air accident investigation agency, the BEA, said in a statement the Laplace ship left Thursday from Corsica for the zone of the crash, with two BEA investigators aboard.

The Laplace is equipped with three detectors made by the ALSEAMAR company designed to detect and localise signals from the flight recorders, believed to be about 3,000 metres underwater.

France may also send an unmanned submarine and deep-sea retrieval equipment.

ALSEAMAR’s equipment includes three of its DETECTOR-6000 systems, designed to pick up black-box pinger signals over long distances up to 5km, according to the company’s website.

It works by dipping a slender probe into the water to listen for pings and then retrieving it to download the findings.

ALSEAMAR, a subsidiary of French industrial group Alcen, did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2004, the same company deployed a system of “intelligent buoys” to search for black boxes after a Boeing 737 belonging to Egypt’s Flash Air crashed in the Red Sea near Sharm al-Sheikh.

Negotiations are also under way to contract a second firm, Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, to search more than one area, French and Egyptian officials said.

That firm was originally involved in the search for missing Malaysian jet MH370, but it and others voiced complaints about the conduct of the search after being rejected when responsibility shifted from Malaysia to Australia.

No clear picture

A week after the Airbus A320 crashed with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 from France, investigators have no clear picture of its final moments.

But Egyptian investigators said a radio signal had been received from an emergency distress beacon usually located in the rear of the cabin. This could help narrow the search area for that part of the fuselage, near the tail where “black box” fight recorders are held, to a 5km radius, they said.

The emergency locator transmitter (ELT) sends out a signal that can be picked up by satellites in the international search-and-rescue network when an aircraft is in an accident.

It is separate from the underwater locator beacons (ULB) or “pingers” attached to the “black box” flight recorders, which send out acoustic rather than radio signals and are designed to be more easily detected underwater.

Search teams are working against the clock to recover the two flight recorders that will offer vital clues on the fate of flight 804, because the acoustic signals that help locate them in deep water cease transmitting after about 30 days.

Ayman al-Moqadem, Egypt’s head of air accident investigations, said the investigating team had received radar imagery and audio recordings from Greece detailing the flight trajectory of the doomed plane and the last conversation between its pilot and Greek air traffic control.

It is expecting France to hand over radar imagery and other data covering the plane’s time in French airspace and on the ground in Paris, he added.

Sources in the investigation committee have said the EgyptAir jet did not show technical problems before taking off from Paris. During flight, it sent signals that at first showed the engines were functioning but then detected smoke and suggested an increase in temperature at the co-pilot’s window.

The plane kept transmitting messages for the next three minutes before vanishing.

With no flight recorders to check and only fragmentary data from a handful of fault messages including two smoke alarms, investigators are also looking to debris and body parts for clues.

Moqadem said no bodies had been recovered so far, with search teams only able to locate small body parts. DNA tests are underway to identify the remains.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

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