(VOVworld) - Investigators of the EgyptAir plane crash will need at least 12 days to recover the black boxes of the missing Airbus A320.

A French soldier searches for debris from the crashed EgyptAir flight MS804 over the Mediterranean Sea (Photo: AFP)

They need a ship that can retrieve them from the bottom of the Mediterranean, sources say. Investigators are in a race against time to locate the flight recorders, known as black boxes, which have only enough battery power to emit signals for four or five weeks. The investigators are searching for the black boxes at a depth of around 3,000 metres, some 290 kilometres north of the Egyptian coast.