Egypt Says Signals Picked Up From Doomed Plane's Black Boxes

CAIRO (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Egypt says a French ship has picked up signals from deep under Mediterranean Sea, presumed to be from black boxes of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month, killing all 66 passengers and crew on board.

The Civil Aviation Ministry is citing a statement from the committee investigating the crash as saying the vessel Laplace is the one that received the signals.

The statement said Laplace's equipment picked up the signals "from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders."

Wednesday's statement says 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's terribly important to find the black boxes, because if they don't find them, they will know nothing about the aircraft," David Learmount, a consulting editor at the aviation news website Flightglobal, told CBS News.

The search for the EgyptAir plane that crashed May 19 killing has narrowed to a 3-mile area in the Mediterranean. Pieces of wreckage and human remains have already been recovered from the site.

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