On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said a team of investigators comprising personnel from Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration had secured invitations to join the probe led by Chinese authorities. Boeing, as the plane’s manufacturer, was expected to take part.
A day earlier, China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing was ready to facilitate the travel of the American investigators. However, their date of arrival and adherence to the country’s strict quarantine regulations remain under discussion.
The aftermath of MU5735’s crash has gripped the nation as well as its leadership. China’s President Xi Jinping called for a swift and thorough investigation into its causes. The country’s civil aviation authority grounded all Boeing 737-800 aircraft, an otherwise reliable airframe with a good safety record. The aircraft involved was delivered in June 2015 and had been in use for six years and nine months.
The airplane carrying 123 passengers and nine crew was headed from Kunming to Guangzhou, both in southern China, when it made an unexplained rapid descent on March 21. Flight-tracking website FlightRadar24 showed the plane plunging at a rate that reached nearly 31,000 feet per minute before it struck mountainous terrain in Teng County in Guangxi region.
Aviation authorities said the China Eastern pilots failed to respond to repeated hails from air traffic controllers during the incident, which caused the aircraft to disintegrate, setting off a forest fire. Over the weekend, rescuers said all 132 people on board died in the crash. Their identities were confirmed through DNA tests this week.
Perplexed investigators said the event took place in fair weather. It was China’s first major air disaster in nearly a decade, and the deadliest since 160 people were killed on a China Northwest Airlines flight in 1994.
As hundreds of people combed the scattered debris field last week, investigators said they had managed to recover both “black boxes” belonging to the aircraft. The cockpit voice recorder, which captured communications between the pilots, was found on March 23. The flight data recorder—tracking several dozen variables—was dug up three days later.
The extent of the damage sustained by the devices was not immediately known, but Chinese authorities said they had been sent to Beijing for data extraction and analysis. Investigators hope they can offer some insights into the circumstances surrounding the deadly crash.
