Breakthrough in search for doomed jet's black boxes

CAIRO -- A French ship has picked up signals from deep under the Mediterranean Sea from one of the black boxes of EgyptAir Flight 804 that crashed last month, killing all 66 passengers and crew on board.

French officials confirmed to CBS News on Wednesday an earlier Egpytian Civil Aviation Ministry statement saying that the French Navy vessel Laplace was the one that received the signals. It did not say when the signals were detected but the French Navy confirmed the Laplace arrived on Tuesday in the search area.

Laplace's equipment picked up the "signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders," an Egyptian statement read. It added that a second ship, John Lethbridge affiliated with the Deep Ocean Search firm, will join the search team later this week.

Locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as the black boxes, can be picked up from deep underwater. It is not clear which of the two recorders was located.

The Laplace is equipped with three detectors made by the Alseamar company designed to detect and localize signals from the flight recorders, which are believed to be at a depth of about 9,842 feet underwater. By comparison, the wreck of the RMS Titanic is lying at a depth of about 12,500 feet.

The Airbus A320 had been cruising normally in clear skies on a nighttime flight to from Paris to Cairo early on May 19 when it suddenly lurched left, then right, spinning all the way around and plummeting 38,000 feet into the sea. A distress signal was never issued, EgyptAir has said.

Since the crash, small pieces of the wreckage and human remains have been recovered while the bulk of the plane and the bodies of the passengers are believed to be deep under the sea. A Cairo forensic team has received the human remains and is carrying DNA tests to identify the victims. The search has narrowed down to a 3-mile area in the Mediterranean.

David Learmount, a consulting editor at the aviation news website Flightglobal, said the black boxes' batteries can transmit signals up to 30 days after the crash. But even if the batteries expire, locating the boxes remains a possibility.

"It's terribly important to find the black boxes, because if they don't find them, they will know nothing about the aircraft," he said, citing a 2009 incident when black boxes were found two years after a crash in the Atlantic Ocean.

Nearly two weeks after the crash off Egypt's northern coast, the cause of the tragedy still has not been determined.

Egyptian officials have told CBS News they believe it was more likely a terror attack that brought the plane down than a technical failure.

But no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet. Earlier, leaked flight data indicated a sensor had detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the plane's cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.

In France, the country's air accident investigation agency or the BEA could not immediately comment on the developments since they have not yet received any "official communication" from Egyptian authorities.

Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, said last week in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" people should not jump to conclusions about what happened.

"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 ... it's the evidence, facts, that we must rely on," Sullenberder said.

Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully landed a 2009 U.S. Airways flight in the Hudson River next to New York City, said terrorism is certainly a possible cause -- but added that there are other things that could go wrong mid-flight that have nothing to do with an intentional act.

"Well of course we will know a lot more once aircraft wreckage has been recovered and examined," he said. "But what we can say right now is that whatever the triggering event was, it was not sufficient to immediately destroy the entire airplane."