Air crash disaster risks an even wider rift for Boeing and China

Rescue teams with a piece of the fuselage from the crashed China Eastern aircraft, near Wuzhou, Guangxi. - AFP

BEIJING (Bloomberg): Determining why a Boeing passenger jet flown by China Eastern Airlines plummeted to the ground from 29,000 feet (8,840m) is a thorny task in itself. Now, politics risks complicating the investigation and amplifying the fallout.

With relations between Washington and Beijing at their lowest ebb in years, the probe into China's worst aviation disaster in more than a decade - the crash of a United States-made plane run by a Chinese, state-owned airline - has turned the two archrivals into reluctant bedfellows.