China 737 crash clues awaited as black boxes arrive in US

Bloomberg

Investigators trying to figure out why a Boeing Co 737-800 plunged to the ground in China last month could gain key clues within days from the jet’s black boxes, which were sent to the US.
“I’d expect within a week the investigation team would have the information,” said Neil Campbell, a retired air-safety investigator at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau who worked on the Boeing 737 Max disaster in Indonesia in 2018. “For an accident like this, the recorders are critical.”
The two flight recorders, built to withstand high-speed impacts, have become central to solving the March 21 mystery considering the China Eastern Airlines Corp flight disintegrated into more than 40,000 pieces when it slammed into a hillside. Both Boeing and China Eastern have much hanging on an investigative breakthrough.
More than 200 of China Eastern’s Boeing 737-800 planes have been grounded for two weeks now because there was no obvious reason why the jet entered a sudden nosedive, killing all 132 people on board. And any evidence that clears or implicates Boeing could be critical for the US manufacturer in China, where it’s working to resume deliveries of the 737 Max jet after a three-year halt.
Results from the black box analysis could take up to two weeks, said Mike Poole, chief executive officer of Ottawa-based Plane Sciences, which helps countries develop air-accident investigation capabilities.
Poole said he’s never known data to be totally irrecoverable because of the force of a crash but said it still takes time to download it, convert it into useful information and analyse the details correctly.
China Eastern Flight 5735 from Kunming to Guangzhou was cruising at about 29,000 feet when it suddenly dived at high speeds. The dispatch of the black boxes to the US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory in Washington alleviates concerns, at least to some degree, that strained US-China relations might hamstring the investigation into the disaster.
The exact status of the two recorders remains unclear. NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss declined to go beyond the investigation agency’s statements. The safety board has said it was assisting the CAAC with the download of the cockpit voice recorder at its lab in Washington, but wouldn’t
be releasing any information about its contents. Chinese authorities have also allowed a seven-person team sent by the NTSB to arrive in China, according to Xinhua News Agency.