China plane crash today: Flight with 132 people crashed in Guangxi province

The People’s Dailythe official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, quoted a provincial fire department official involved in the rescue effort as saying there was no sign of life among the scattered dirt.

President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, called on investigators to determine the cause of the crash as soon as possible and to guarantee “absolute” aviation safety, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The safety record of the China airline industry has actually been one of the best in the world in the last decade.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, the last fatal jet crash of the superpower was in 2010, when 44 of 96 people on board were killed, such as an Embraer E-190 regional jet flown by Henan Airlines, on the approach of Yichun airport and low visibility has decreased.

In 1994, a China Northwest Airlines Tupolev Tu-154, which flew from Xian to Guangzhou, crashed, killing all 160 people on board and classified as China’s worst air disaster ever.

Crashes of this type, during the cruise phase of the flight, are meanwhile relatively rare.

Boeing stated in a report last year that only 13 percent of fatal commercial accidents worldwide occurred between 2011 and 2020 during the cruise phase.

“It was cruising at 29,100 feet until 06:20:59 when it suddenly started to lose altitude very quickly,” says FlightRadar24 of MU5735.

The flight tracking service has released data that appears to show the Boeing 737-800 crashing in southern China, from level flight to descending at a rate of nearly 22,000 feet per minute over the course of 16 seconds.

The rate of altitude loss increased even more, but after 45 seconds there seemed to be a decline, with a sharp elevation gain before the descent resumed.

The data seems to stop 96 seconds after descent.

China Eastern Airlines is said to be the sixth largest airline in the world by scheduled weekly seating capacity and is the largest in China.

The 737-800 model that fell today has a good safety record but is the predecessor of the 737 MAX model, which was established for more than three years in the country after fatal accidents in Indonesia in 2018 and in Ethiopia in 2019.

China Eastern has 109 of the 737-800s in its fleet, according to FlightRadar24.

My colleague Simon Calder provides this background on the company and the Boeing model concerned.

Footage apparently showing the MU5735 falling through the air in an almost vertical fall and from its wreck on a rural mountain is currently being widely shared on social media, apparently deleted from the Chinese social network Weibo.

Although not all are immediately possible to verify, one we can show you can pick up plumes of steam from a bamboo forest near where the plane is believed to have gone down.

Fire shakes after China’s Boeing 737 jet ‘crashes into mountain’

Martin Chalk, Secretary General of the British Pilots Association, said this in the morning tragedy:

The China Eastern Airlines website is currently displaying black-and-white, a gesture that airlines are making in response to a crash out of respect for the victim.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China has issued a statement confirming the loss of China Eastern Flight MU573 with a total of 132 people on board: nine crew and 123 passengers.

“Accident protocols have been initiated and special units are being deployed at the crash site,” the statement read.

A Chinese plane carrying 132 people has crashed in southern Guangxi province, the country’s civil aviation authority has just confirmed.

The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft had 123 passengers and nine crew members on board and departed from the southwestern city of Kunming in Yunnan at 13.11 (5.11 GMT).

This video tracks the initial progress of the flight:

Flight tracking video shows MU5735 flight depart Kunmining

It was due to land in Guangzhou, Guangdon, on the east coast of Hong Kong, at 15.05 (7.05 GMT) but apparently ran into difficulties, near the city of Wuzhou in Teng County, Guangxi Province.

Here is my friend Chiara GiordanoThe breaking story about everything we know so far.