The crash of a Boeing 737-800 passenger jet in China’s southwest started a fire big enough to be seen from space and forced rescuers to search a rugged, remote mountainside.
One day after the China Eastern Airlines flight plunged from the sky, there are more questions than answers.
The cause is unknown. Flight 5735 was at 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) on Monday afternoon when it went into a dive about an hour into its flight, according to flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.com.
The plane plunged to 7,400 feet (2,200 meters) before regaining about 1,200 feet (360 meters), then dived again. It crashed into the side of a mountain in a remote, forested area outside the city of Wuzhou.
State media and Chinese regulators gave no indication the pilot reported trouble or other information that might shed light on the cause of the disaster. The plane stopped transmitting data 96 seconds after it started to fall.
Rescue workers planned to use drones in the search for the plane’s black boxes, which should contain information from instruments and sound from the cockpit.
Confirming the cause of a plane crash sometimes takes months or years due to the need to gather badly damaged debris and examine specialized technical factors.
The plane was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members from the city of Kunming in China’s southwest to Guangzhou, an export hub in the southeast.
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No survivors have been found as rescuers search the rugged, charred mountainside in the semitropical Guangxi region.
In this image taken from video footage run by China’s CCTV, debris is surrounded by police tape and marked number at the site of a plane crash in Tengxian County in southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Tuesday, March 22, 2022. Mud-stained wallets. Bank cards. Official identity cards. Some of the personal effects of 132 lives presumed lost were lined up by rescue workers scouring a remote mountainside Tuesday for the wreckage of a China Eastern plane that one day earlier inexplicably fell from the sky and burst into a huge fireball.
(CCTV via AP Video)
No foreigners are believed to have been on board. Two Chinese companies said their employees were on the flight, including the CFO of Guangzhou-based Dinglong Culture Co. whose interests range from mining to TV and movie production.
Family members gathered in closed-off waiting areas at the airports in both Guangzhou and Kunming. Chinese news reports said five hotels with 700 rooms had been requisitioned closer to the crash site for family members.
No. The plane that crashed was a Boeing 737-800, not the Boeing 737 Max, a newer model that was temporarily grounded worldwide following two deadly crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019.
Photo taken with a mobile phone shows pieces of a crashed passenger plane’s wreckage found at the crash site in Tengxian County, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, March 22, 2022. A passenger plane with 132 people aboard crashed in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Monday afternoon, the regional emergency management department said. The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft, which departed from Kunming and was bound for Guangzhou, crashed into a mountainous area near the Molang village in Tengxian County in the city of Wuzhou at 2:38 p.m., causing a mountain fire, according to the department. The airline said the cause of the accident will be fully investigated.
(Photo by Zhou Hua/Xinhua via Getty Images)
This photo taken on March 21, 2022 shows paramilitary police officers conducting a search at the site of the China Eastern Airlines plane crash in Tengxian county, Wuzhou city, in China’s southern Guangxi region. – A China Eastern passenger jet carrying 132 people crashed onto a mountainside in southern China on March 21 causing a large fire, shortly after losing contact with air traffic control and dropping thousands of metres in just three minutes. – China OUT (Photo by CNS / AFP) / China OUT (Photo by -/CNS/AFP via Getty Images).
The widely used Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has an excellent safety record, said Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. They have been involved in 22 accidents that damaged the planes beyond repair and killed 612 people.
China Eastern grounded all of its 737-800s after the crash, China’s Transport Ministry said.
The Boeing 737 Max, which entered service in 2017, was grounded by regulators following the two crashes. They were blamed on a computer system that pushed the nose downward in flight and couldn’t be overridden by pilots.
Airlines were allowed to resume using the 737 Max after Boeing redesigned the system in a process overseen by regulators from the United States, Europe, China and the Middle East.
© 2022 The Canadian Press
