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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.
"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.
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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 will be released by China.
They referred further questions - including why the NTSB was handling the cockpit voice recorder data rather than Chinese investigators - to the Civil Aviation Administration of China, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A CAAC official said last week that the recording material from the black box appeared to have survived the crash relatively unscathed. Investigators in Beijing were reported by state media to have already begun their own efforts to extract the data.
In line with international agreements, the NTSB was invited to participate in the investigation since the plane was manufactured by an American company. Boeing and engine-maker CFM International are also taking part.
The NTSB has also dispatched officials to travel to China. The body revealed on Friday that those investigators would operate within an effective Covid-19 bubble, skirting China's strict quarantine requirements for overseas visitors.
"Investigators will limit interactions with those outside of [the] investigation similar to safety protocols at Beijing Olympics, which will allow them to begin work immediately without a quarantine," the NTSB posted on Twitter.