EgyptAir Flight 804’s emergency location transmitter (ELT) has been located by Airbus within a circle of 5 km radius, head of Egypt’s investigative committee Ayman El Moqaddem told Ahram Gate on Wednesday. The ELT is a distress signal transmitter and is distinct from the black boxes (as the cockpit voice and flight data recorders are known). The discovery of the ELT should help searchers in their efforts efforts to locate the black boxes.

It is unclear to us whether Egyptian authorities have contracted two international companies to help search for the black boxes of flight MS804. Reuters had quoted EgyptAir chairman Safwat Mosallam as saying that an agreement had been reached with a French and an Italian company to conduct deep sea searching in the Mediterranean, 3,000 metres deep. Al Ahram’s breaking news portal is running a denial by Mosallam that EgyptAir had anything to do with the agreement. Mossallam stated that only the Egyptian investigation committee is authorized to make such an agreement, but gave no concrete statement whether an agreement had taken place. Two French diplomatic sources told Reuters that Egyptian authorities and France’s BEA air accident investigation agency were finalising a contract with two French companies, Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search and Alseamar.

“It might be terrorism, it might be technical or any third possibility,” said Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry about the crash in an interview with NBC News on Tuesday. He warned terrorists might make a claim of responsibility even when they can’t back it up with hard proof — or stay silent to “create a high sense of confusion.” Shoukry said the hunt is still in its early stages, but “we can always get lucky” in finding all of the wreckage.

And as the search continues, with days running out to find the black boxes before their batteries run out and they cease broadcasting location signals, Bloomberg writes that some accident investigators are saying “it’s time to employ technology to make crash data available immediately.” Investigators are pushing for instant access to critical clues about crashes either through streaming in real time via satellite or by devices designed to jettison from the plane. “The industry has to look at itself and say, is it time?…the public is demanding it,” said Tony Fazio, aviation consultant and former accident investigation chief for the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Also worth reading this morning on the topic: Tamer El Ghobashy and Robert Wall’s “Crash Is a Test of EgyptAir’s Mettle” for the Business section of the Wall Street Journal, which does a good job at getting international readers up to speed with EgyptAir.