The first available audio from EgyptAir Flight 804 showed the pilot in normal contact with Swiss air traffic controllers as the flight continued on its course from Paris toward Cairo, hours before officials lost contact with the jet, the Associated Press reported Saturday evening.
The seemingly standard dialogue came to light hours after Egypt denied media reports the doomed jet's black boxes had been located.
The new audio indicated that all was routine as the plane checked in with air traffic controllers in Zurich late Wednesday night, before being handed over to Italian air traffic controllers in Padua.
Control: "EgyptAir804 contact Padova 1-2-0, decimal 7-2-5, good night."
Pilot: "This is 0-7-2-5 Padova control. (Unintelligible) 8-0-4. Thank you so much. Good day, er, good night."
The audio recording was taken from www.liveatc.net, a website that provides live air traffic control broadcasts from around the world.
The communication occurred around midnight local time, about 2 1/2 hours before Greek air traffic controllers in Athens lost contact with EgyptAir Flight 804.
Earlier Saturday, Egypt denied reports that the black boxes from the missing plane had been located by investigators seeking answers to what brought down the aircraft over the Mediterranean.
A senior official at the Egyptian Civil Aviation Ministry refuted the reports as did a spokesman for Egypt's military who said he had no information to share on the retrieval of the black boxes, or cockpit voice and flight data recorders.
The statements came as French investigators announced Saturday that smoke was detected in multiple places on the ill-fated EgyptAir plane before it plummeted into the Mediterranean Sea.
The Aviation Herald initially reported that sensors detected smoke in a lavatory, suggesting a fire on board the aircraft before it went down.
David Learmount, a noted aviation expert, told Fox News Friday that the data received from some satellites indicates that a fire could've started in the avionics compartment of the plane which knocked out computers and control mechanisms on the flight. He said that would've caused the plane to crash.
French officials didn't say what could have caused parts of Flight 804 to fill up with smoke. Spokesman Sebastien Barthe told the Associated Press the plane's automatic detection system sent messages indicating smoke a few minutes before it disappeared from radar.
He said the messages "generally mean the start of a fire."
"We are drawing no conclusions from this. Everything else is pure conjecture," Barthe added.
According to The Wall Street Journal, sensors aboard the plane detected smoke in the lavatory on the aircraft's nose. The paper, citing someone familiar with the aircraft's data, reported the messages suggest there was damage to the right-side of the cockpit windows.
Officials who have reviewed the data told the Journal that the broadcast information by itself is insufficient to determine whether the plane crashed because of a bomb or another cause. Rockwell Collins, a global aviation telecommunications provider, said late Friday it transmitted the messages over its networks to the carrier in real time.
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Fox News' Greg Palkot and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
