EgyptAir's Second Black Box Is Found

The flight data recorder of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month, killing all 66 people on board, was recovered early Friday from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, one day after the plane's cockpit voice recorder was also retrieved. The announcement from the Egyptian investigation committee came two days after officials said they had found the wreckage of the Airbus A320 and had started mapping its debris on the seabed. The latest findings raise hopes that investigators will be finally able to determine the cause of the crash and whether the plane broke apart in the air, or stayed intact until it struck the water, reports the AP.

On Friday, the committee said in a statement that the vessel John Lethbridge, contracted by the Egyptian government to search for the plane wreckage, pulled the data recorder out of the sea in stages. It added that it managed to "successfully retrieve" the memory unit of the recorder which is the "most important" component. While the statement didn't elaborate on the condition of the recorder, it implied that the memory unit had been safely recovered. The two units, the so-called black boxes, are tucked into the plane's tail. The wreckage was believed to be at a depth of about 9,800 feet. Previously, search crews found only small floating pieces of debris and some human remains. The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was flying to Cairo from Paris when it crashed on May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast. (More EgyptAir crash stories.)