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China Eastern crash: US transport safety board helping download black box data from cockpit
- US helping China’s investigation into the Flight 5735 disaster by downloading the data from the cockpit voice recorder
- American investigators have also left for China to assist in the crash probe and will operate in a strict Covid bubble
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The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has been tasked with downloading cockpit voice recorder data recovered from the China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed in southern China last month.
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“NTSB investigators are assisting the Civil Aviation Administration of China with the download of the cockpit voice recorder from China Eastern Flight 5735 in our lab in Washington,” an NTSB representative said in a statement on Friday.
The move, first reported by Reuters, comes almost two weeks after flight MU5735 crashed into a forested hillside after plummeting suddenly from cruise altitude of around 8,900 metres (29,100 feet). None of the 132 people on board the Boeing 737-800 survived.
The cockpit voice recorder, which captures conversations between pilots and other audio clues from within the cockpit, was recovered two days after the crash.
A second “black box” that captures flight data, including pilot inputs and plane performance, was found on Sunday.
It can take days or even weeks to analyse data recovered from the black boxes of crashed aircraft. The NTSB representative said that any information from the investigation would be released by China.
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