KARACHI: Air crash investigators were en route from Pakistan to France on Monday with two 'black box' flight recorders of a PIA plane that crashed in a residential area while trying to land in Karachi last month, airport officials said.

An Airbus test plane, unusually commissioned to transport the boxes because of disruption from the coronavirus crisis, was due to arrive on Monday afternoon at Le Bourget near Paris where France's BEA air accident agency was standing by to open them.

The French agency is involved in the Pakistan-led probe because the crashed A320 was designed by France-based Airbus, and is additionally carrying out the crucial task of decoding the recorders because it has state-of-the-art equipment.

BEA experts are expected to open and download information from the boxes - one containing cockpit voice recordings and the other aircraft data - on Tuesday, subject to the recording chips being intact inside their crash-resistant shells.

Initial reports suggested the jetliner scraped its engines along the runway on a first attempt to land following what appeared to be an unstable approach, arriving steep and fast.