Egyptian investigators said Saturday that memory chips in the cockpit voice recorder of an ill-fated EgyptAir plane were not damaged and experts should be able to reconstruct key conversations to help determine why the plane went down in May, killing all 66 people aboard.
Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a statement that French experts in Paris needed to replace some secondary parts of the cockpit voice recorder that communicate with the memory chips, but the chips themselves were intact and undamaged.
"Test results were satisfactory as (they) enabled the reading of the recorders of the CVR memory unit," the statement said.
Investigators are trying to determine why EgyptAir Flight 804, en route from Paris to Cairo on May 19, suddenly plummeted 38,000 feet into the Mediterranean Sea after lurching to the left 90 degrees.
The pilots of the Airbus A320 made no distress call, and no militant group claimed it brought down the aircraft off the Egyptian coast.
The flight data recorder, also recovered more than two weeks ago, indicated smoke in the lavatory and onboard equipment, and investigators say they found heat damage on parts of the wreckage.
Deep ocean search teams are still working to find and recover human remains in and around the wreckage, found at a depth of around 9,800 feet.
