The Egyptian investigation committee said the flight data recorder of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month killing all 66 people on board was recovered early Friday from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, one day after the plane's cockpit voice recorder was also retrieved.

The announcement came two days after officials said they had found the wreckage of the Airbus A320 and had started mapping its debris on the seabed.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was flying to Cairo from Paris when it crashed on 19th May between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.

Previously, search crews found only small floating pieces of debris and some human remains.

On Friday, the committee said in a statement that the vessel John Lethbridge, contracted by the Egyptian government to search for the plane wreckage, pulled the data recorder out of the sea in stages. It added that it managed to "successfully retrieve" the memory unit of the recorder which is the "most important" component.

The statement implied that the memory unit had been safely recovered.

The committee said that the data will be downloaded and analysed once it arrives from the port city of Alexandria, where they will be transferred from the site of the crash.

Source : WAM