U.S. experts join probe into crash

U.S. accident investigators arrived in China on Saturday to help authorities look for clues into what caused last month’s crash of a Boeing jetliner with 132 people aboard. The seven-member team from the National Transportation Safety Board will participate in the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s investigation of the March 21 crash of an American-made China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800.

As part of that assistance, the plane’s cockpit voice recorder is being downloaded and analyzed at a lab in Washington, federal officials said.

Investigators hope the recording will explain why the plane went into a nosedive from about 29,000 feet over a mountainous region in southeastern China. Officials have said that air traffic controllers were unable to get a response from the pilots while the plane was descending.

Searchers also recovered the plane’s flight-data recorder, which constantly captures speed, altitude, heading and other information and the performance of key systems on the aircraft, but that recorder was not being evaluated in Washington on Friday.

The impact caused by the crash in China created a 65foot-deep crater, set off a fire in the surrounding forest and smashed the plane into small pieces scattered over a wide area, some of them buried underground. More than 49,000 pieces of debris have been recovered, along with human remains and personal items.

A Chinese aviation safety official said a preliminary investigation report would be completed within 30 days of the crash.