A senior French naval officer said yesterday a flight recorder from a plane that crashed into the Red Sea had been roughly located but was too deep to be retrieved by equipment currently at the site.
The "black box" records technical data about the flight and conversations between pilots, and should help explain what caused Saturday's crash which killed all 148 people on board, including 133 French tourists.
"We have an approximate zone of between 600-800 metres for one of the flight recorders. We do not have the equipment to retrieve this immediately," said French Rear Admiral Jacques Mazars, who is leading the search effort.
French officials have said a French submersible robot brought to the site to retrieve the device could only dive to 400 metres.
Adm Mazars said more equipment had been requested.
"It could take up to one week to get the equipment," Adm Mazars said in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh near the crash site of the Boeing 737.
In 1996 the US navy recovered a flight recorder from 2,195 metres down after a chartered jet crashed off the Dominican Republic.
Professional divers can go to only about 250 metres.
Adm Mazars said the signal transmitted by the flight recorders to aid the search could continue for several weeks.
"You cannot say that we can take our time, but we have time."
The flight recorders should help resolve doubts over the cause of the crash.
France said on Monday it gave little credence to a previously unknown Islamic group's claim to have brought down the plane. Egypt has ruled out an attack.
Egypt has also defended the safety record of Flash Airlines, operators of the plane, but Switzerland has said it banned the Egyptian company from its airspace on safety grounds.
Swiss authorities said on Monday they had found two Flash aircraft unsafe in 2002, raising the possibility that one was the plane that crashed on Saturday. Flash officials were not available for comment.
But they have said the doomed plane was one of only two that Flash has operated in recent years. Swiss officials could not confirm positively that it was one of those they had inspected.
French Transport Minister Mr Gilles de Robien said yesterday that thorough checks had been carried out on the Flash planes in Norway and Morocco in December 2002 and January 2003.
He also said Germany conducted a global evaluation of the airline's safety in September and October and deemed it satisfactory.
Poland's aviation authorities said on Tuesyesterday they had barred Flash Airlines as unsafe until mid-2002, when the firm was declared safe.
The French parliament observed a minute of silence on Tuesyesterday in memory of the victims.- (Reuters)
Five airlines which have such poor safety records that they have been banned in at least one country are having their identities kept secret, the BBC reported yesterday.
The information is held on a vast database in France and the Netherlands.
National governments know, but passengers and - crucially - even tour operators can find out only if a government decides to reveal the information.