BEA Ends Technical Work on Crashed Boeing’s Flight Recorders

BEA, the French agency for civil aviation safety, said technical work on the cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders from the Boeing 737 Max that crashed in Ethiopia last Sunday has ended.

The information from both recorders was successfully downloaded and handed over to the Ethiopian probe team, BEA said in a tweet on Sunday. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing Co. also took part in the technical work.

Ethiopia’s probe team now needs to decide which agency it will assign to analyze the data that’s been collected, a spokesman for the BEA said, adding that the French agency is available for such work if needed. Analyzing the data is likely to take “several weeks,” the spokesman said.

Ethiopia’s Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said on Saturday that it would take between five and six months to identify the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines jet. All 157 people on the plane were killed in the crash.