On Monday, March 21, 2022, China Eastern flight 5735 took off from the southern
Chinese city of Kunming carrying 132 passengers. And just over an hour later
it fell from the skies. Here is everything we've uncovered about the crash so far
thank you to brilliant for sponsoring this video if you're looking for a fun and interactive way
to learn topics in stem check out the link in the description so what happened flight 5735 was
operated by china eastern airlines between the city of Kunming and Guangzhou which is a flight
time of around 2 hours and 10 minutes. Now this is a very popular route with multiple airlines
offering daily flights and in every regard flight 5735 was just another one of those typical flights
it took off on time at 1:11 pm local time and for the next hour everything proceeded as normal
until it entered into the airspace of the city of Wuzhou. This was the same area where the day prior
the same exact flights started its descent into its destination of Guangzhou and up until that
point there was no indication that anything had gone awryL in fact the weather was normal
it was slightly cloudy and there were no abnormal reporting coming from the pilots however at 2:22
pm local time 1 hour and 10 minutes into the flight air traffic control lost contact with the
pilots and saw that the plane had began to descend rapidly or rather it might be more accurate to
say it started to free fall because over the next four minutes the plane would descend 26
000 feet before disappearing off of radar it had reached a maximum speed of 157 meters per second
and flight data also shows that around 7 400 feet mark the plane had actually regained some altitude
momentarily before rapidly descending again and during this time air traffic control attempted
to contact the plane multiple times but received no response now one redundant thing that i still
want to call out here is that it is incredibly hard for planes to just free-fall even if it
does lose all of its powers and controls and flights its natural tendency is still to glide
and not just tip over and even if it does enter into a nose dive there are typically opportunities
for the pilot to recover the aircraft given that there is enough altitude but that does rely on two
pretty important assumptions one is that the aircraft stays intact and two that it does not
enter into an unrecoverable nosedive now i'm not going to speculate around what might have caused
the crash so we're just gonna have to wait for the official investigation to conclude on that one
but in the meantime let's discuss some of the other factors around this crash
now probably the first question on all of our minds when we heard about this
is was this the 737 max is mcas really back at it again and the answer to that is no the
plane that was involved was a boeing 737-800 that's a part of their next generation or ng
line now these were single aisle twin-engine aircraft that served as the predecessor to the 737
max so on one hand that's great news the max has stayed accident free since its return
in 2020 but maybe the more alarming thing here is that this specific model the -800 is one
of the most widely used commercial airliners in history with over 4200 planes currently in service
now this model alone makes up for around 17% of all passenger planes in the skies today
so maybe one solace we can find here is that since their introduction back in 1990
the -800 has had an incredibly strong safety record with just 12 fatal crashes in the span
of 32 years that means there was roughly one fatal crash for every 10 million flights on this plane
and when we take a closer look at what exactly caused those 12 crashes a large number of them
were actually due to the development of stress fatigue in the metal after years and years of use
however the plane that was involved in the crash this time was just delivered in 2015
making it just under seven years old and for a plane that's designed to last decades
that's considered a baby and that's especially true if you consider that the typical age of
8-800 in service today is around 13 years old what has also been brought up recently is the fact that
regulators may have noticed a fault in the dash 800s back in 2019 the faa ordered the inspection
of 737 max and ng planes including the dash 800's now this was due to cracks that were found on a
component called the leading edge slot tracks was found to require more frequent replacement
than was originally designed for but this was an issue that affected a very small number of older
ng planes and it was unlikely to have affected the aircraft involved since it was still quite new
and the faa even made sure to highlight that even complete failure of this component would not bring
an aircraft down all in all signs are pointing away from any defect in the 737-800 themselves
and although china eastern has decided to ground all of their fleet of that model other airlines
around the world are still continuing to operate the aircraft now one thing that
was out of the ordinary for this flight was its crew typically short-haul flights like this one
are flown by two pilots the captain and the first officer but in this case there was a
third pilot in the cockpit the second officer who was there to observe and gain experience
and not only that the first officer on flight 5735 was allegedly one of the most experienced
commercial pilots in china with over 30 000 flight hours he not only trained over a hundred captains
for china eastern but had actually trained the captain on that flight and sadly he was planning
to retire just later this year others have also drawn attention to the aviation safety record of
china eastern and chinese aviation as a whole now today airlines in china are among the world's
safest but just a few decades ago that couldn't be further from the truth for much of the 90s
chinese airlines were considered to be some of the most dangerous in the world with a horrific
crash record that was due to a combination of poor pilot training improper repairs and overall just
attempts to cut corners in fact at its worst there were fatal crashes happening within weeks of each
other and this became so concerning that boeing and airbus were worried that this would affect the
reputation in the seal of their aircraft and so they decided to set up permanent training programs
in china that would offer pilots training programs as well as simulator time for free and china was
also very aware of its aviation safety problem and so they decided to recruit the help of the faa
and boeing to essentially rewrite its aviation regulations and to encourage compliance the
government had actually threatened to withhold aircraft deliveries from airlines if they didn't
have a good plan on how they were going to improve safety and as a result of these changes and years
and years of progress china is a country with one of the best air safety records today the last
fatal crash in China happened in august of 2010 when an Embraer SA operated by Henan Airlines
crashed during landing which killed 42 of its 96 passengers and china eastern airlines which
operated flight 5735 had gone 17 years without any fatal accidents prior to monday so where are
we today well investigation is still ongoing with help being offered by the ntsb and boeing and so
far we have recovered one of the two black boxes which we know contains the cockpit voice recorder
the other box which contains the flight data recorder is still yet to be found but we do
know that it is equipped with a battery that will help it emit a location beacon for the next 30
days or so unfortunately due to heavy rain and the mountainous terrain around the crash sites
search and rescue efforts have been delayed and unfortunately we do not expect that there
are any survivors and as i mentioned i do want to reiterate that everything that i've talked
about in this video has come from the internet and the news which is prone to inaccuracies
and speculation and so to find out the truth of what actually happened we still need to wait for
official reports to come out so guys that is everything we know about the crash of china
eastern flight 5735 now i know this is a pretty heavy topic that's pretty atypical for my channel
but it just felt a little weird for me to you know talk about my normal plane content with
light-hearted jokes so i hope you still enjoyed it this time um but next week we will be back to our
regularly scheduled programming but if this was an informative video for you please give it a thumbs
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