KEY POINTS:
An Air New Zealand flight is due in Auckland about 11am today with the bodies of the four New Zealanders killed in the November 27 Airbus A320 crash off the coast of France.
Accompanying them are relatives, who made the trip to France for the handover of their remains.
Coffins bearing the bodies of Air NZ Captain Brian Horrell, 52, from Auckland, Christchurch engineers Michael Gyles, 49, and Noel Marsh, 35, and Civil Aviation Authority airworthiness inspector Jeremy Cook, 58, of Wellington, left France as the accident probe entered its eighth week.
In Paris, safety experts will meet this week at the headquarters of the Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses pour la Securite de l'Aviation Civile, the French agency responsible for the investigation.
It is hoped a preliminary report on the crash can be released by the end of the month.
In Perpignan, southern France, specialist Navy divers are retrieving debris from the wreckage, which is buried in mud at a depth of 40 metres.
The team have been using underwater robots to map the area where the plane crashed. Weather permitting, they will haul larger chunks of the shattered fuselage out of the sea this week.
The Airbus smashed into the Mediterranean on November 27, killing the two German pilots and the four New Zealanders.
Air New Zealand engineer Murray White is still missing.
Families of the two German pilots killed in the accident are due in Perpignan today to collect the remains.
Scant details of the investigation have been made public.
The plane, which was being handed back to Air New Zealand by Germany's XL Airways, was on a routine test flight and was considered new in aviation terms - little more than three years old.
According to Perpignan prosecutor Jean-Pierre Dreno, the twinjet experienced a sudden surge in engine power that drove it up into the sky at a steep angle. It was unable to recover, and plummeted nearly vertically into the sea.
Whether this manoeuvre was caused by human error or a malfunction is to be investigated.
A veteran accident investigator, Tommy McFall, sounded a note of caution to those tempted to speculate on the cause of the disaster.
"The evidence that is being spoken about is incomplete, it is not substantiated," McFall, a former investigator with the US National Transportation Safety Board, told the Herald.
"At the end of the day I feel sure that it will all make sense and that the DFDR [digital flight data recorder] and the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] will both be consistent and we'll figure it out."
