EGYPTAIR Flight 804 crashed: Egypt fails to pull data from damaged recorders.
(CNN)What sent EgyptAir flight 804 plummeting into the Mediterranean Sea last month, remains a mystery.
Egyptian investigators have failed to extract any information from the badly-damaged memory chips of the crucial black boxes.
Defeated, Egypt is now sending both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder to the BEA in France in an effort to help download the data.
The BEA -- the French version of the NTSB -- are considered some the best in the world at analyzing this type of equipment.
In a statement released on Thursday, EgyptAir said the French will "carry out repair and removal of salt accumulations."
"Then (the black boxes will be sent) back to Cairo to perform data analysis at the labs of the Ministry of Civil Aviation.
The flight data recorder gathers 25 hours of technical data from the airplane's sensors, recording several thousand distinct pieces of information, including air speed, altitude, engine performance and wing positions.
The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds from the flight deck, including flight crew conversation, alarms and background noise that can help investigators understand what the flight crew was doing.
The black boxes offer the best clues to determining why the Airbus A320 crashed into the ocean, while en route from Paris to Cairo on May 19, with 66 people on board.
~News