AUTHORITIES SAY THAT none of the 123 passengers and nine crew aboard a China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 that plunged into a Guangxi hillside on March 21 survived.
Rescue teams have identified 120 of the victims so far through DNA analysis. The search for human remains and plane wreckage continues in the steeply wooded and rain-sodden area.
The crash is China’s most deadly aviation disaster in nearly three decades.
State media report that the second ‘black box’, the flight data recorder, has been found. The first, the cockpit voice recorder, was recovered earlier. It was reportedly badly damaged, but aviation officials said on March 26 that data is being downloaded and analysed.
THERE ARE NO reports of survivors from the Kunming to Guangzhou flight that plunged into a forested hillside near Wuzhou in Guanxi on Monday afternoon with 123 passengers and nine crew on board. Nor, as of Tuesday, had any bodies been recovered, according to state media.
China’s first fatal civil aviation accident in more than a decade has understandably caused widespread shock.
Some 2,000 rescuers who have reached the mountainous district are searching for the aircraft’s flight-data cockpit-voice recorders, assisted by drones. Aviation experts hope the ‘black boxes’ will reveal the cause of the tragedy. However, the high speed of impact may have destroyed them. (Update: At least one of the black boxes has been found, authorities said on March 23.)
The airliner involved, a Boeing 737-800 that was less than seven years old, and the airline, China Eastern Airlines, have strong safety records.
It is too early to speculate on the cause of the accident. Yet, the aircraft essentially nosediving into the ground from a cruising altitude of around 9,000 metres, as shown in the graphic above from the flight-tracking website, FlightRadar 24, suggests an extraordinarily untoward incident, rather than the sort of design problem that caused the worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737 Max after two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) will handle the investigation. As the aircraft was US-made, the US National Transportation Safety Board has appointed an investigator for the crash. It will assist the CAAC, ‘if asked’.
China Eastern has grounded its Boeing 737-800s fleet. Of the more than 4,200 of the aircraft in service worldwide, Chinese airlines account for 1,177. The CAAC has urged an immediate two-week-long safety overhaul of civil aviation.
Since the unsafe flying days of the 1980s and 1990s, China’s civil aviation had become remarkably safe thanks to investment in new aircraft and strict safety rules imposed after two flights crashed within a month in 2002, with a combined loss of 234 lives.
Last month, the CAAC said that Chinese airlines had set a world record on February 19 by operating without a major accident for 100 million flying hours, stretching back to August 2010 when a Henan Airlines flight from Harbin crashed on approach to the airport in Yichun in Heilongjiang province.
China Bystander 