Black Box Signal Detected From EgyptAir Flight 804
French investigators from the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) confirmed that signals have been detected from one of the two black boxes from EgyptAir Flight 804 on Wednesday. According to the Guardian, the signals were received by the French Navy vessel Laplace. The plane crashed into the Mediterranean Sea last month, killing all 66 passengers and the flight crew.
Remi Jouty, the BEA director, said, “A flight recorder signal has been picked up on equipment … deployed on the naval vessel Laplace.”
Immediately after the EgyptAir Flight 804 crash, there was speculation that it was an act of terrorism. However, no terrorist group has claimed credit for the tragedy, leaving the cause of the incident a mystery.
Aviation expert Capt. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger gave his opinion on CBS’ Face the Nation.
“In many walks of life, it’s just human nature to shoot from the hip or jump to conclusions, but in safety critical domains like aviation, like medicine, and some others, it’s the evidence?facts that we must rely upon to reach conclusions. And it’s following the facts, following the truth wherever it leads us, that helps us eventually solve even the deepest mysteries…In the light of recent events, certainly in that part of the world and others, it’s natural, it’s human nature to think of terrorism in the forefront. But there have been, even though a level flight in cruise is statistically the safest portion of the flight, accidents in the cruise portion of the flight including of course Air France 447 over the South Atlantic in June 2009, and in climb near cruise, AirAsia flight 8501 just recently. There are possible reasons that an airplane in cruise could come into grief… We’ll know much more of course when the digital flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder are recovered and analyzed, hopefully soon, but what we can say right now is that whatever the triggering event was, it was not sufficient to immediately destroy the entire airplane. That for several minutes conditions allowed electrical power to still be supplied to certain systems in the airplane that could detect faults automatically transmit those bits of information to the ground.”
Once the black box is located, the cause of the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804 may be solved. The black box, or Flight Data Recorder (FDR), is actually orange in color and is virtually indestructible. In addition to any information the pilots may have recorded, the FDR records data from the airplane sensors, including altitude, engine performance, the speed of the aircraft, among several thousand other pieces of data.
The Australian inventor of the FDR, the late David Warren, explained his inspiration for creating the technology that has solved many mysteries.
“People were flying much higher, much faster, than ever before at greater altitudes over big distances over the Earth that normally we wouldn’t have covered, it was very hard sometimes to work out why a plane had crashed…When the world’s first jet airline had crashed in India in 1953, there were no witnesses, no survivors, and there wasn’t any obvious reason of what had caused it. Now you’ve got to find out what caused it to stop it from happening again…”
Similar to the 1953 crash, EgyptAir Flight 804 leaves the same mysteries with no witnesses and no survivors. A civil aviation ministry official told CNN that once the black box is located, it will be brought back to Egypt.
[Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images]
