Egypt has deployed a submarine to hunt the Mediterranean Sea for the crucial cockpit voice and data recorders from doomed EgyptAir Flight 804.
In his first public comments about the plane crash that killed 66 people, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi cautioned finding the exact cause of the incident “will take time.”
“This is not one scenario that we can exclusively subscribe to … all scenarios are possible,” he said Sunday on Egyptian television.
The submarine can operate at a depth of 9,842 feet and headed to the eastern Mediterranean Sunday. El-Sissi didn’t give further details about the submersible.
El-Sissi vowed to work with French authorities to unravel the mystery of what happened to the fated flight, which took off from Paris bound for Cairo Thursday and was just inside Egyptian airspace when it suddenly turned left, then pivoted toward the right, spun around and dropped 38,000 feet into the sea without a distress call, authorities said.
Smoke was detected in different parts of the airplane, including the cockpit and the bathroom, officials said.
“It is very, very important to us to establish the circumstances that led to the crash of that aircraft,” el-Sissi said.
A French television station reported the pilot communicated with air traffic controllers for several minutes before the aircraft went down, contradicting official accounts that there was no word from the plane before it crashed.
The pilot reported the smoke and decided to make an emergency descent in an attempt to eliminate the fumes, stations M6 reported, according to The Independent.