The plane crashed into a mountainside with 132 people on board.
Wuzhou:
Crash investigators said on Tuesday they don’t yet know why a China Eastern jet with 132 people on board crashed into the sky as rescue teams still scour a forested mountainside for the flight recorders of the shattered Boeing plane.
The speed of the crash, which left twisted metal and scattered passenger belongings across a swath of forest, meant no survivors had been found nearly 36 hours after Monday’s crash.
It is the deadliest air disaster in China in three decades, in a country with an enviable record of air security.
“With the current information, we cannot make a clear judgment about the cause of the accident,” Zhu Tao, director of the aviation safety bureau at the Chinese aviation authority, said late Tuesday. look for flight recorders.”
Questions have been raised about the cause of the crash, with the stricken plane falling 20,000 feet (6,096 meters) in just over a minute before plunging into rugged terrain in southern China Monday afternoon.
The airline has officially acknowledged that some people on board the jet en route from Kunming city to the southern hub of Guangzhou were killed, but failed to pronounce everyone on board as dead.
President Xi Jinping quickly called for a full investigation after the crash when search teams armed with drones descended on the site in a forested, rural area of Guangxi province.
‘Sounds like thunder’
On Tuesday, scorch marks from the crash and ensuing fire were visible, rescuers told AFP, with one speculating that passengers were “completely burned” from the intensity of the fire.
A villager near the sprawling crash site, who mentioned only his last name Ou, said he heard a “sound like thunder” followed by a fire that blistered the surrounding hills.
A ruptured wallet and a burnt camera lens were among the stolen belongings captured on video by a reporter for the state-run People’s Daily who was able to enter the crash site.
But AFP journalists were blocked at a checkpoint on a hill by a group of men identifying themselves as members of the Communist Party who said they were “ordered from above” to prevent entry.
The disaster happened after a rapid vertical nosedive, according to a video from Chinese media. AFP could not immediately verify the authenticity of the video.
‘I miss you forever’
Flight MU5735, which took off from Kunming shortly after 13:00 (0500 GMT), lost contact over Wuzhou, a city in the Guangxi region, according to the Chinese aviation authority.
The Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday it believed all passengers on board were Chinese citizens.
At the Guangzhou airport, staff helped loved ones of the 123 passengers and nine crew members aboard the plane, which stopped sending flight information after descending a total of 26,000 feet in just three minutes.
Relatives and friends of those on board waited grimly for news.
A user on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like platform, wrote that he was a friend of a crew member on the crashed plane.
“I will miss you forever,” he wrote, describing the “enthusiasm” that took his friend to his new job this year.
The disaster prompted an unusually quick public response from Xi, who said he was “shocked” and called for “absolute safety” in air traffic.
State media said Deputy Prime Minister Liu He, a powerful official close to Xi and usually dealing with economic affairs, had been sent to the area to oversee rescue and investigation efforts.
Flight-tracking website FlightRadar24 showed the plane descended sharply from an altitude of 29,100 feet to 7,850 feet in just over a minute.
After a brief rebound, it plunged to 3,225 feet, the tracker said.
Despite a huge growth in travel, China has a strong track record in flight safety.
Chinese media reported that the airline will now ground all its Boeing 737-800 jets.
The deadliest accident involving a Chinese commercial flight was a 1994 China Northwest Airlines crash that killed all 160 people on board.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
