Last weekend, Egyptian officials confirmed that EgyptAir Flight 804 did send out a distress call while it crashed in the Mediterranean Sea earlier this month.

Lieutenant Jason Wilson, an US official from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also mentioned that an emergency beacon was picked up by the satellites minutes after the disappearance of the airlines from radar on May 19 as it was flying from Paris to Cairo.

A posting on Egypt's State Information Service website said investigators had "received satellite reports indicating receiving an electronic distress call from the plane's emergency locator transmitter (ELT)". The coordinates were reportedly being used to narrow down the search area, according to the Guardian.

Notably, the EgyptAir flight contained 66 passengers, but investigators have found more than 80 human piece remains. Some of them contained burn marks, which suggest that the plane crash was caused by an explosion. Thus, terrorism as a cause has not been ruled out yet.

Investigators have mentioned that they will need more than a week to retrieve the plane's black box, but the team is continuing with the wreckage search to get a better estimate of the situation.

According to experts, the flight recorders have enough battery left to emit signals for four to five weeks. Meanwhile, France and Egypt have signed agreements with two French companies namely Deep Ocean Search (DOS) and Alsemar.

"Those two companies have complementary roles: the first is for locating the pings of the black boxes (the signal being emitted by the black boxes' beacon), while the second is for diving and recovering them," a source close to the investigation agency mentioned.

France's aviation safety agency, however, has mentioned that the aircraft transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin in addition to a fault in the flight control unit before losing contact.