A Chinese passenger plane with 132 people on board has crashed in a forested hillside in
southern China. The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou when
it plunged to earth in Guangxi province and caught fire. The number of casualties and
the reason for the crash are not yet known. Rescuers have seen no signs of survivors.
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“China Eastern Boeing 737-800 Crashes.” So without any further ado, Let's begin.
More than 18 hours after a Chinese airliner carrying 132 people
crashed into a mountainous area in the southern province of Guangxi, no survivors have been found
as the search continued Tuesday, Chinese state media reported. The Boeing 737-800,
operated by China Eastern Airlines, crashed Monday afternoon with 123 passengers
and nine crew members on board, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
“Wreckage of the plane was found at the scene, but up until now, none of those aboard the plane
with whom contact was lost have been found," state broadcaster CCTV said Tuesday morning.
No survivors have been found among the 123 passengers and nine crew members, China's state
media say. Video clips show small pieces of the plane scattered over a wide forested area, some
in green fields, others in burnt-out patches with raw earth exposed after fires burned in the trees.
Each piece of debris has a number next to it, the larger ones marked off by police tape. The Boeing
Co. 737-800 was knifing through the air at more than 640 miles (966 kilometers) per hour, and at
times may have exceeded 700 mph, according to data from Flightradar24, a website that tracks planes.
“The preliminary data indicate it was near the speed of sound,” said John Hansman,
a Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronautics and aeronautics professor
who reviewed Bloomberg’s calculation of the jet’s speed. “It was coming down steep.”
Sound travels at 761 mph at sea level but slows with altitude as air temperature goes down and
is about 663 mph at 35,000 feet (10,668 meters). Air safety and aviation standards in China have
improved vastly in recent decades, following a series of accidents in the 1990s, and crashes
such as this are now very rare. The country's last major plane accident was in August 2010,
when a flight from Harbin crashed in northeast Yichun during foggy weather, killing 42 people.
China Eastern has set up a hotline for people seeking information about those on board.
It expressed "its deep condolences for the passengers and crew members who died".
Earlier, it greyed out its logo on its Weibo account and also changed
its website to black and white in an apparent sign of mourning.
As a precaution, China Eastern's entire fleet of Boeing 737-800 jets has been grounded. It
took just two and a half minutes for an apparently normal flight to turn into a tragedy. The aircraft
was a 737-800, a well-proven design first produced in the late 1990s. It is a workhorse
of the aviation world, with thousands still in service. It has a strong safety record. Fatigue
cracks have been found in some older planes, but this one was not quite seven years old.
There is no connection here with the 737 MAX, a newer version of the 737,
which was grounded for more than a year and a half after a design flaw triggered two major accidents.
Investigators will be looking at many possible causes among them
deliberate action, such as terrorism, technical issues such as structural failure,
or a mid-air collision. They will look at communications from the pilots, examine
the state of the wreckage and search for the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
Those recorders should contain the information needed to confirm
exactly what happened during those minutes and why. The U.S. National
Transportation Safety Board said it had appointed an American senior air safety
investigator as a U.S. accredited representative to the investigation.
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