One of the black box recorders from the crashed EgyptAir Flight MS804was recovered from the Mediterranean on Thursday, according to Egyptian authorities, reports The Telegraph.
The discovery of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) is major step forward in determining what happened to the doomed flight and whether it was brought down by a terrorist's bomb or a technical fault.
The Airbus 320 crashed on May 19th as it flew from Paris to Cairo, killing all 66 people aboard.
The CVR is one of two so-called black boxes on the Airbus 320 and it records what was said in the cockpit in the final moments before the plane went down.
The other black box, the flight data recorder, which records readings from the aircraft's systems, has not yet been found.
The Egyptian investigation committee looking into the crash said the CVR was damaged but that its memory unit, which contains the crucial data, appeared to be intact.
"The vessel's equipment was able to salvage the part that contains the memory unit, which is considered the most important part of the recording device," the committee said in a statement.
The CVR was recovered by a specialist ship owned by a Mauritian company just a few hours after deep-sea robot located the main wreckage of the plane at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
The aircraft went down in a particularly deep part of the sea, where depths can reach nearly 10,000 feet.
The discovery of the CVR will come as a major relief to investigators because its sonar underwater locator beacon, designed to guide investigators to the black box, was likely to lose battery power on June 24th.