WUZHOU, CHINA – Mud-colored purses. Bank cards. Official identity cards. The memories of 132 lives that were presumably lost were erected by rescue workers who hit a distant Chinese mountain on Tuesday for the wreckage of a China Eastern flight that had inexplicably fallen from the sky the day before and into a huge fireball. broke out.
No survivors were found between the 123 passengers and nine crew members. Video clips posted by the Chinese state media show small pieces of the Boeing 737-800 aircraft scattered over a wide forest area, some in green fields, others exposed in burnt spots with rough earth after fires in the trees were burned. Each piece of debris has a number next to it that is marked larger with police tape.
Search teams planned to work through the night with their hands, picks, sniffer dogs and other equipment to search for survivors, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
The steep, rough terrain and the huge size of the rubble field have complicated the search for the black box that holds flight data and cockpit voice recorders, CCTV and the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Drones were used to search for the fragments of wreckage that were scattered on both sides of the mountain in which the plane crashed, state media reported.
How family members gathered at the destination and departure airports, which led to the plane falling from the sky shortly before it began its descent into the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou, remained a mystery.
At an evening news conference, a grim face Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said that efforts were focused on finding the black box and that it was too early to speculate on a possible cause. . the crash.
“So far, the rescue has still found survivors,” Zhu said. “The public safety department has taken control of the site.”
Zhu said an air traffic controller tried to contact the pilot several times after seeing the height of the plane sharply, but received no response.
The inability to reach the pilots at such a crucial moment was not necessarily a problem in itself, said William Waldock, a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.
“When dealing with an emergency, pilots are taught” to fly, navigate, then communicate. “Sinn, fly the plane first,” Waldock said. “If there was some sort of major mechanical problem, they might have their hands full trying to control the plane.”
The crash left a deep pit in the mountain about the size of a football field, Xinhua said, citing rescuers. Chen Weihao, who saw the falling plane while working on a farm, told the news agency that it had hit a ravine in the mountain where no one was living.
“The plane seemed to be in one piece when it was nosediveg. Within seconds, it crashed,” Chen said.
China Eastern Flight 5735 crashed outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region as it flew from Kunming, the capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, to Guangzhou, an industrial center not far from Hong Kong on the southeast coast of China. It built a fire large enough to be seen on NASA satellite images before firefighters were able to extinguish it.
No foreigners were on board the lost flight, the foreign ministry said, citing a preliminary review.
Dinglong Culture, a Guangzhou company in both mining and television and film production, said in a statement to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange that its CFO, Fang Fang, was a passenger. Zhongxinghua, an accounting firm used by Dinglong, said two of its employees were also on the run.
The crash site is surrounded on three sides by mountains and is accessible only by foot and motorbike on a steep dirt road in the semi-tropical Guangxi region, known for some of China’s most spectacular scenery.
Rain fell on Tuesday afternoon as excavators dug a path to make access easier, CCTV said. The steepness of the slope made the position of heavy equipment difficult.
A base of operations was set up next to the accident site with rescue vehicles, ambulances and an emergency power supply truck parked in the narrow space. Soldiers and rescue workers scoured the charred crash site and the surrounding heavily dense vegetation.
Police restricted access, checking every vehicle that entered Molang, a village close to the accident. Five people with swollen eyes got out of the village, got into a car and left. Spectators said they were family members of the passengers.
Family members gathered at Kunming and Guangzhou airports. People dripping in pink blankets and falling into massage chairs could be seen in a traveling rest area in the basement of the one in Kunming. The workers brought the mattresses to the wheel and brought the food. A security official blocked an Associated Press journalist from entering, saying “interviews will not be accepted.”
In Guangzhou, families were escorted to a reception center by staff with full protective equipment to protect against the coronavirus.
At least five hotels with more than 700 rooms in Wuzhou Teng County were asked for family members, Chinese media reported.
Workers in Hazmat costumes set up a registration bus and administered COVID-19 tests at the entrance of a hotel outside Molang. A sign reads: “The hotel was using a plane crash emergency for March 21st.” At another hotel, a group of women, wearing some vests with red cross markings, registered at a hotel desk outside.
The nation’s first fatal plane crash in more than a decade dominated China News and social media. World leaders including Britain’s Boris Johnson, India’s Narendra Modi and Canada’s Justin Trudeau have posted condolences on Twitter.
Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun said the company was deeply saddened by the news and offered the full support of its technical experts to assist in the investigation.
“The thoughts of all of us at Boeing are with the passengers and crew members … as well as their families and loved ones,” he wrote in a message to Boeing staff.
The plane was about an hour into its flight, at an altitude of 29,000 feet (8,840 meters), when it took a steep, fast dive at 2.20pm, according to data from FlightRadar24.com. The plane dropped to 7,400 feet before returning shortly above 1,200 feet in altitude, and then sank again. The plane stopped 96 seconds after the dive with data transmitted.
The aircraft was delivered to the airline in June 2015 and has been flying for more than six years.
Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, where the flight was headed, is one of the main airports in China. It is the home base for China Southern Airlines. As the pandemic launched air travel, it was rocketed along Beijing and Atlanta to claim the title of the busiest airport in the world by 2020 – the last year for which annual data are available – handling more than 43 million passengers.
Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong province, home to exporting factories that make smartphones, toys, furniture and other goods. Its Auto City district has joint ventures operated by Toyota, Nissan and others. Kunming, the departmental city located 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) west, is the capital of Yunnan Province, an agricultural, mining and tourism center bordering Southeast Asia.
China Eastern, which is headquartered in Shanghai, has established all of its 737-800s, the China Department of Transportation said. Aviation experts have said that it is unusual for a whole fleet of planes to land unless there is evidence of a problem with the model.
The airline is one of China’s three largest carriers with more than 600 aircraft, including 109 Boeing 737-800s. The basis could further disrupt domestic air travel, already limited due to the largest COVID-19 outbreak in China since its initial peak in early 2020.
The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has an excellent safety record, said Hassan Shahidi, President of the Flight Safety Foundation. It is an earlier model like the 737 Max, which was established worldwide for almost two years after fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019.
Before Monday, the last fatal crash of a Chinese plane occurred in August 2010, when an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground shortly after the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun. It carried 96 people and 44 of them died. Investigators admitted the pilot error.
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Kang reports from Kunming, China. Associated Press researcher Yu Bing and News Assistant Caroline Chen in Beijing, Researcher Si Chen in Shanghai, video producer Olivia Zhang in Wuzhou, China, writer Adam Schreck in Bangkok, and airline writer David Koenig in Dallas all contributed to this report.
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