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  

up and subscribe to my channel for new content now  lastly i wanted to mention that during quarantine  

i've been spending a lot of time on self learning  and a great platform that i've been using to learn  

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you