"The US National Transportation Safety Board is dispatching three investigators to France Thursday to assist with the downloading and analysis of flight recorders from the Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed Sunday near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia," the release said.
The French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) will be downloading the flight data recorder and cockpit recorder in support of the Ethiopian investigation, the release noted.
Meanwhile, a representative from the BEA confirmed to Sputnik that the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder of the crashed aircraft have been delivered to the bureau, where they will be analyzed.
"Yes, the devices have been at BEA since 1 p.m. [local time, 12:00 GMT]," the representative said.
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As BEA announced on Twitter, their experts will start on Friday decryption work on flight data and voice recorders of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft that crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa last week, BEA said on Thursday.
"Ethiopian accident investigation team has arrived at @BEA_Aero with CVR [cockpit voice recorder] and FDR [flight data recorder] today at 1 pm / Coordination meetings are in progress / Technical work will start tomorrow," BEA said on Twitter.
The day before, the Ethiopian authorities asked the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), the French aviation safety watchdog, for assistance in analyzing the black boxes of the jet. Shortly before that, the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU) announced it would not be involved in the analysis of the plane's flight data recorder due to the lack of software for it.
The Nairobi-bound Boeing 737 MAX 8 of the Ethiopian Airlines crashed early on Sunday. All 157 people from over 30 countries who were on board were killed. The causes of the accident are yet unknown. According to the airline, the plane was well-maintained.
Another Boeing 737 MAX crashed in Indonesia back in October, killing all 189 people on board. The deadly crashes have prompted dozens of countries around the world, including the United States, to either ground the plane series or close their airspace to the aircraft.
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