Egypt says crashed MS804 ‘black box’ fixed as France opens manslaughter inquiry

The flight data recorder of crashed EgyptAir flight MS804 has been successfully repaired, according to Egyptian authorities, as French investigators open a manslaughter investigation into how the jet headed from Paris to Cairo came down.

The plane’s two recorders – one containing flight data, the other carrying voice recordings from the flight deck – were handed over to French experts after they were recovered damaged from the wreckage in the Mediterranean and Egyptian investigators could not download their contents.

The investigators in Egypt said on Monday that the repaired data recorder would be returned to Cairo for analysis of its contents, while the doomed plane’s cockpit voice recorder was still being worked on.

The plane crashed on 19 May with the deaths of all 66 people on board. There was no evidence so far to link it to terrorism, the French officials said.

Prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation – a normal procedure when French citizens are involved – and have now handed their findings to judges for a fully fledged probe into manslaughter.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, said the inquiry was launched on Monday as an accident investigation, not a terrorism case. She said authorities were not favouring the theory that the plane had been brought down deliberately.

The decision to open the investigation was based on evidence gathered so far, she said.

The pilots of the French-manufactured Airbus A320 made no distress call, and no group claimed responsibility.

France’s Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA), which took charge of repairing the memory units, notably extracted the data from the black boxes of Air France flight 447, which crashed between Rio de Janeiro and Paris in 2009. In that case the flight recorders were submerged for almost two years before being retrieved.

France’s aviation safety agency has said the aircraft transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before it disappeared.

Egyptian investigators have said the aircraft made a 90-degree left turn followed by a 360-degree turn to the right before hitting the sea.

The crash came after the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula in October 2015 that killed all 224 people on board.

source: The Guardian