EgyptAir MS804: Second black box recovered from doomed Airbus A320 that crashed in Mediterranean

Egyptian authorities have recovered the second black box from EgyptAir flight MS804, which disappeared while en route from Paris to Cairo on 19 May.

The Egyptian investigation team has said the flight data recorder in the doomed plane was spotted and recovered from the Mediterranean on 17 June. The voice recorder from the cockpit of the aircraft was discovered on the day before.

Authorities said the voice recorder would be taken to Alexandria in Egypt to be studied after being recovered by a search vessel with an underwater robot.

Airbus, the aircraft's manufacturer, had previously said that finding the black boxes was crucial to understanding what happened when the flight disappeared off the radar.

The cockpit voice recorder should contain the last two hours of cockpit audio and will allow investigators to hear what the pilot and co-pilot were saying to each other, as well as whether any alarms were going off in the background.

The discovery comes two days after the Egyptian government said that the search vessel had identified several locations of wreckage from the flight. Debris and human remains have also been found in the search for the plane.

Electronic messages from the plane previously revealed that smoke detectors had gone off inside the toilets and the plane's electrics minutes before the flight vanished from the radar. Greek investigators also believe that the plane turned 90 degrees left and then 360 degrees to the right, before dropping sharply and disappearing from the radar.

However, the crew on board do not appear to have sent a distress call. Although a terror attack has not been ruled out, no extremist group has claimed responsibility for the disappeared plane and analysts have said that human or technical error is a possibility as well.