Black box of doomed Chinese jet is found

Investigators searching the site where a China Eastern jet crashed, killing all 132 people on board, have found the aircraft’s black box.

Liu Lusong, a spokesman for China’s aviation authority told reporters the flight recorder ‘from China Eastern MU5735 was found on March 23’.

The discovery comes after the head of aviation safety revealed pilots of the doomed flight did not respond to multiple calls from air-traffic controllers as the plane entered a fatal dive into a mountainside.

The Chinese Boeing 737-800 was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew from Kunming in Yunnan province to Guangzhou when it crashed on Monday afternoon outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region.

All 132 people on board are presumed dead after rescue workers speculated that the fire resulting from the crash had ‘totally incinerated’ the passengers and their belongings, before causing damage to the surrounding forest.

An air-traffic controllers tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply but got no reply, Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said at a news conference on Tuesday evening.

‘As of now, the rescue has yet to find survivors,’ Mr Zhu said. ‘The public security department has taken control of the site.’

Investigators were seen inspecting a black box from the crashed Chinese jet which was found on Wednesday

Liu Lusong, a spokesman for China’s aviation authority told reporters the flight recorder ‘from China Eastern MU5735 was found on March 23’

Rescuers have been searching for the black boxes at the site of the plane crash but the search was suspended on Wednesday due to heavy rain

An aerial view shows scorched land next to an enormous crater at the site of the plane crash in the Guangxi region

Shocking CCTV footage emerged on social media supposedly showing the jet racing vertically towards the ground in the moments before the smash

The plane went into an unexplained dive an hour after departure, suddenly plummeting 30,000ft in two minutes before slamming into the ground at 350mph.

Investigators, who say it is too early to speculate on the cause of the crash, said the plane stopped transmitting data 96 seconds into the fall.

The investigation, which Zhu said would be ‘very difficult’, was temporarily suspended on Wednesday after rain soaked the debris field and filled the red-dirt gash formed by the plane’s fiery impact.

Zhu said the investigative team would make ‘all-out efforts’ to collect evidence and that they were focusing on searching for the aircraft’s flight recorder box.

‘We will take into consideration all factors in analysing the cause of the accident,’ he added.

Earlier on Wednesday, searchers used hand tools, drones and sniffer dogs in rainy conditions to comb the heavily forested slopes for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, as well as any human remains.

Crews also worked to pump water from the pit created when the plane hit the ground, but their efforts were suspended mid-morning because small landslides were possible on the steep, slick slopes.

Video clips posted by China’s state media showed small pieces of the Boeing 737-800 scattered over the area.

Each piece of debris had a number next to it, the larger ones marked off by police tape.

Mud-stained wallets, bank and identity cards have been recovered.

Relatives of passengers onboard the China Eastern Flight 5735 leave the village near the crash site on Wednesday

Medical workers arrive for duty near the crash site on Wednesday before heavy rain caused the search to be suspended

Local media identified the captain of the aircraft as being Yang Hongda, the son of a former airline pilot, who aviation professionals said had an ‘excellent’ safety record.

The first officer was named as Zhang Zhengping, a 58-year-old with 40 years experience and more than 30,000 hours of safe flying, reported the Times.

A rescue official reportedly said the plane had completely disintegrated while a fire sparked by the crash ripped through bamboo and trees before being put out. China Eastern expressed ‘deep condolences’ after confirming the fatalities of 123 passengers and nine crew who were onboard, adding that all the victims were Chinese.

Horrifying CCTV footage emerged on social media supposedly showing the jet racing vertically towards the ground in the moments before the smash.

FlightRadar tracking data showed the aircraft cruising at 29,100ft at 2.20pm. Around two minutes later it had plummeted to just over 9,000ft and 20 seconds after that it had fallen to just 3,225ft. The data indicates a vertical descent of 31,000ft per minute or around 350 mph.

Altitude data also appears to show aircraft regain height at around 7,5000ft before beginning its final descent.

The incident represents China’s deadliest air crash in nearly three decades. The deadliest Chinese commercial flight accident was a China Northwest Airlines crash in 1994, which killed all 160 onboard.

China Eastern is based in Shanghai and is one of China’s three largest carriers with more than 600 planes, including 109 Boeing 737-800s.

The plane, flight number MU5735 from Kunming to Guangzhou, got into trouble over the city of Wuzhou, before it plummeted 29,100ft into a mountainside on Monday

Altitude data also appears to show aircraft regain height at around 7,5000ft before beginning its final descent, although commentators have warned the figures could be anomalies

China’s transport ministry said China Eastern has grounded all of its 737-800s, a move that could further disrupt domestic air travel already curtailed because of the largest Covid-19 outbreak in China since the initial peak in early 2020.

The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has a well-established safety record. It is an earlier model than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.

In August 2010, an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the north-eastern city of Yichun and caught fire.

It carried 96 people and 44 of them died. Investigators blamed pilot error.

What are the latest clues in China’s plane crash?

Chinese investigators attempting to determine why a passenger jet with 132 people on board crashed in a remote forested region this week have been faced with challenging conditions.

The search for the black boxes and any survivors – a remote possibility at best – was temporarily suspended Wednesday due to rain on the muddy, charred mountainside.

The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 was flying at 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) on Monday afternoon when it suddenly nosedived into a gap in the mountains outside the southern Chinese city of Wuzhou.

What have rescuers found?

Rescuers with sniffer dogs and drones have found wallets, identity cards and small parts of plane debris. Authorities have given no indication they found survivors, bodies or the plane’s ‘black box’ flight recorders.

Parts of the plane are scattered over a wide area, including the other side of the mountain, state broadcaster CCTV said. The main crash area, now a large barren pit in the forested mountainside, is about half the size of a football field.

Searchers must climb steep inclines as they fan out in the area, which is surrounded on three sides by mountains and accessible by a dirt road.

What are investigators saying?

Investigators have declined to discuss possible reasons for the crash. Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said damage to the aircraft was severe, which makes the investigation ‘very difficult’.

‘We cannot have a clear assessment of the cause of the accident with the information currently available,’ Zhu said at a Tuesday night news conference, the first since the crash.

Authorities are ‘carrying out in-depth investigation’ of the aircraft’s design and maintenance, air traffic control, weather and other issues, he said.

What about the black boxes?

Investigators will make an all-out effort to collect evidence, with a focus on finding the flight recorder, Tao said.

Recovering the so-called black boxes is key to the investigation – they are usually painted orange for visibility, but the longtime name has stuck. One device, called the flight data recorder, captures information about the plane’s airspeed, altitude, direction up or down, pilot actions, and performance of all key systems. The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds including conversations and background engine noise during the flight.

Even with the extent of the damage to the plane, investigators should be able to get a good idea of what happened if the black boxes survived and can be downloaded.

What is known about the plane?

The six-and-a-half-year-old plane’s ‘technical condition was stable’ and met requirements to fly, said Sun Shiying, the chairman of the Yunnan provincial branch of China Eastern Airlines.

The flight had departed the city of Kunming in Yunnan and was headed to Guangzhou in Guangdong province.

The 737-800 has an excellent safety record, said Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. It is from an earlier generation of the 737 series than the Boeing 737 Max jets, which were grounded after crashes in 2018 and 2019. The 737-800 does not have the flight control software that was blamed for the 737 Max crashes.

How has the Chinese government responded?

The central government has sent a team led by Vice Premier Liu He and a senior Cabinet official, State Councilor Wang Yong, to the site to ‘guide rescue work’ and the investigation of the crash.

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