China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 was on a short journey between two cities in southern China, at an altitude of more than 29,000 feet, on Monday when it began a violent plunge to Earth. Residents in the area described hearing a bang, apparently from the plane that had crashed into a hill, then saw smoke from the fires it had started.
On Tuesday, emergency services continued to comb the hilly rural area for the Boeing 737-800 flight recorders and any sign of survivors among the 132 people on board. The odds of finding someone alive seemed slim. “It was in fragments that were scattered all over,” Li Chenbin, a technician in the area, told the China News Service. “I haven’t seen anyone who has experienced it.”
Many questions remain about what led to the crash of flight MU5735. Here’s a look at what we know so far:
The plane plunged more than 20,000 feet in about a minute.
Flight 5735 took off at 1:16 p.m., according to data from Flightradar24, a tracking platform. The first hour of the flight proceeded normally, with the aircraft cruising at 29,100 feet until it began to dive at approximately 2:20 PM and lost over 20,000 feet in just over a minute.
After briefly regaining an altitude of about 8,000 feet, he dived again.
The plane’s sudden dive occurred near a point on the route where it would normally begin to descend, according to Flightradar24 data. The 675-mile flight from Kunming, the capital of southwestern China’s Yunnan province, to Guangzhou, a major city in southeastern Guangdong province, usually takes about two hours. It crashed in Teng County in the Guangxi region.
It is relatively rare for an aircraft to crash while cruising or on the first descent. While cruising takes up more than half the time commercial aircraft spend in the air, only 13 percent of fatal accidents occur during this phase, according to a Boeing report covering data from 2011 to 2020. percent of fatal crashes occur during the first origin.
Experts warned that preliminary flight data does little to determine what could have led to the crash. Possibilities range from mechanical failure to a struggle in the cockpit, said Shawn Pruchnicki, a professor of aviation safety at Ohio State University.
“It doesn’t tell us much other than that what happened was catastrophic,” he said.
The aircraft was a workhorse model with a history of reliable service.
The plane was a Boeing 737-800 that had flown for almost seven years. It was not a 737 Max, the model that has been grounded worldwide after two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 caused by a faulty flight stabilization system.
The 737-800 is part of Boeing’s Next Generation series. It is a narrow model, with nearly 5,000 built since it first went into production in the late 1990s. The widely used model has a good track record of safety, with 22 fuselage losses, meaning the aircraft was damaged beyond economic repair, as recorded over the past two decades, according to the Aviation Safety Network- database.
China Eastern has greatly improved its safety record.
China Eastern Airlines, the country’s second-largest airline, had an eventful record in its early years, with multiple fatal crashes in the late 1980s and 1990s. In 1989, a China Eastern flight lost power after takeoff in Shanghai, killing 34. And in 1993, a crew member error forced an emergency landing in Alaska that killed two passengers.
In 2004, a buildup of ice on the wings of an eastern China plane flying from Baotou in Inner Mongolia caused it to crash, killing 55. Since then, the airline’s safety record has improved dramatically, with no fatal crashes before Monday, according to flight safety databases.
The airline’s safety history mirrors that of China as a whole. In the 1990s, the country was considered one of the most dangerous places in the world to fly. But after officials launched a regulatory review, the country has maintained an admirable safety record. The country’s last major crash before Monday was in 2010.
The investigation has only just begun, but the cause may be complex.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China said Monday it activated an emergency mechanism once it received reports of the crash and dispatched a team to the site to launch an investigation. The agency also said it would require “more industry-wide efforts to improve aviation safety.”
Boeing, the aircraft’s manufacturer, said Monday it was in contact with the US National Transportation Safety Board about the crash, and the manufacturer’s technical experts were willing to assist China’s Civil Aviation Administration in its investigation. .
The first investigation will focus on information from the flight data recorders, or black boxes, that have yet to be recovered. Experts will also study video footage that has surfaced, including security footage from a mining company that appeared to show a plane crashing straight into Earth.
Because aircraft are so technologically complex, the cause of a crash is always difficult to identify and always multi-layered, experts say. Official reports on the cause of a crash can take months or more to complete
“It’s never one thing,” said Thomas R. Anthony, director of the University of Southern California’s aviation safety and security program. “There may be one thing that’s clear, there may be one thing, but it’s never one thing.”