France sends second ship in hunt for EgyptAir black box

France has dispatched a specialised ship to join in the search for the black box of the crashed EgyptAir flight MS804.

The ship with specialist search equipment is expected to join the mission on Friday.

A French naval supply vessel on June 1 picked up a signal from one of the plane’s two flight recorders.

Director of the French air accident agency, BEA Remi Jouty said the first ship continued to pick up locator signals from the first recorder whose location has been narrowed down to about a 2 kilometer radius.

#EgyptAir black box search zone narrows after signal detected | Top News | Reuters https://t.co/79E1MNLOpO pic.twitter.com/M0exzONGwB

— Reuters Africa (@ReutersAfrica) June 2, 2016

Investigators are still trying to understand why the EgyptAir flight which was heading to Cairo from Paris crashed into the Mediterranean sea.

The plane vanished from radar on May 19 shortly after it entered Egyptian air space, killing all 66 people on board.

There have been varied accounts of the last moments of the ill-fated Airbus 320 jet.

The Greek Defence Minister, Panos Kammenos said the Greek radar had picked up sharp swings in the jet’s trajectory, 90 degrees left, then 360 degrees right as it plunged from a cruising altitude to 15,000 feet before vanishing from radar.

But Egypt’s head of air navigation services, Ehab Mohieldin Azmi dismissed the claim saying Egyptian officials saw no sign of the plane swerving, and it had been visible at 37,000 feet until it disappeared.

An Egyptian forensics official on May 24 said an assessment of a body part, not bigger than the palm of a hand recovered as part of debris from the plane had suggested an explosion on board the flight although no traces of explosives had been found.

But Head of Egypt’s Forensics Authority, Hisham Abdelhamid in a statement said the information put out by the official was based on “mere assumptions“ and that it was too early to draw conclusions.

Investigators trying to determine the cause of crash have been looking for clues among the human remains and debris recovered so far from the Mediterranean Sea where the Airbus 320 jet crashed.

Reuters, Agencies