PEOPLE WERE INCINERATED INSTANTLY
Wallets, IDs but no survivors found in China Eastern crash
Mud-stained wallets and bank cards are among personal effects found on a mountainside where 132 lives were presumed lost when a China Eastern plane inexplicably fell from the sky and burst into a fireball
22 March 2022,
WUZHOU, China -- Mud-stained wallets. Bank cards. Official identity cards. Poignant reminders of 132 lives presumed lost were lined up by rescue workers scouring a remote Chinese mountainside Tuesday for the wreckage of a China Eastern flight that one day earlier inexplicably fell from the sky and burst into a huge fireball.
No survivors have been found among the 123 passengers and nine crew members. Video clips posted by China's state media show small pieces of the Boeing 737-800 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.
Search teams planned to work through the night using their hands, picks, sniffer dogs and other equipment to look for survivors, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
The steep, rough terrain and the huge size of the debris field were complicating the search for the black box, which holds the flight data and cockpit voice recorder, CCTV and the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Drones were being used to search the fragments of wreckage that were scattered across both sides of the mountain into which the plane crashed, state media reported.
As family members gathered at the destination and departure airports, what caused the plane to drop out of the sky shortly before it would have begun its descent to the southern China metropolis of Guangzhou remained a mystery.
At an evening news conference, a grim-faced Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said efforts were focused on finding the black box and that it was too early to speculate on a possible cause of the crash.
“As of now, the rescue has yet to find survivors," Zhu said. “The public security department has taken control of the site.”
Zhu said an air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane's altitude drop sharply, but got no reply.
The inability to reach the pilots at such a crucial moment wasn't itself necessarily a problem, said William Waldock, a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.
“If they were dealing with an emergency, pilots are taught to ‘aviate, navigate, then communicate.’ Meaning, fly the airplane first,” Waldock said. “If it was some sort of major mechanical problem, they may have had their hands full trying to control the aircraft."
The crash left a deep pit in the mountainside 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 it hit a gap in the mountain where nobody lived.
“The plane looked to be in one piece when it nosedived. Within seconds, it crashed,” Chen said.
China Eastern flight 5735 crashed outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region while flying from Kunming, the capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, to Guangzhou, an industrial center not far from Hong Kong on China’s southeastern coast. It ignited a fire big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images before firefighters could extinguished 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 TV and movie 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 that two of its employees were also on the flight.
The crash site is surrounded on three sides by mountains and accessible only by foot and motorcycle on a steep dirt road in the semitropical Guangxi region, famed for some of China’s most spectacular scenery.
Rain fell Tuesday afternoon as excavators dug out a path to make access easier, CCTV said. The steepness of the slope made the positioning of heavy equipment difficult.
A base of operations was set up near the crash site with rescue vehicles, ambulances and an emergency power supply truck parked in the narrow space. Soldiers and rescue workers combed the charred crash site and surrounding heavily dense vegetation.
Police restricted access, checking each vehicle entering Molang, a village near the crash site. Five people with swollen eyes walked out of the village, got into a car and left. Onlookers said they were relatives of the passengers.
Family members gathered at Kunming and Guangzhou airports. People draped in pink blankets and slumped in massage chairs could be seen in a traveler rest area in the basement of the one in Kunming. Workers wheeled in mattresses and brought bagged meals. A security guard blocked an Associated Press journalist from entering, saying that “interviews aren’t being accepted.”
In Guangzhou, relatives were escorted to a reception center staffed by employees wearing full protective gear to guard against the coronavirus.
At least five hotels with more than 700 rooms had been requisitioned in Wuzhou's Teng county for family members, Chinese media reported.
Workers in hazmat suits set up a registration desk and administered COVID-19 tests at the entrance to one hotel, outside of Molang. A sign read, "The hotel is requisitioned for March 21 plane accident emergency use.” At another hotel, a group of women, some wearing vests with Red Cross markings, registered at a hotel desk set up outside.
The nation's first fatal plane crash in more than a decade dominated China's news and social media. World leaders including Great Britain's Boris Johnson, India's Narendra Modi and Canada's Justin Trudeau posted condolences on Twitter.
Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun said that the company was deeply saddened by the news and had 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 employees.
The plane was about an hour into its flight, at an altitude of 29,000 feet (8,840 meters), when it entered a steep, fast dive around 2:20 p.m., according to data from FlightRadar24.com. The plane plunged to 7,400 feet before briefly regaining about 1,200 feet in altitude, then dove again. The plane stopped transmitting data 96 seconds after starting to dive.
The aircraft was delivered to the airline in June 2015 and had been flying for more than six years.
Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, where the flight was headed, is one of China’s main aviation hubs. It is the home base for China Southern Airlines. As the pandemic upended air travel, it rocketed past Beijing and Atlanta to claim the title of world’s busiest airport in 2020 — the most recent year for which annual data is available — handling more than 43 million passengers.
Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong province, home to export-driven factories making smartphones, toys, furniture and other goods. Its Auto City district has joint ventures operated by Toyota, Nissan and others. Kunming, the departure city which is 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) west, is the capital of Yunnan province, an agricultural, mining and tourism center that borders Southeast Asia.
China Eastern, which is headquartered in Shanghai, has grounded all of its 737-800s, China’s Transport Ministry said. Aviation experts said it is unusual to ground an entire fleet of planes unless there is evidence of a problem with the model.
The airline is one of China's three largest carriers with more than 600 planes, including 109 Boeing 737-800s. The grounding could further disrupt domestic air travel already curtailed because of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in China since the 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 than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.
Before Monday, the last fatal crash of a Chinese airliner occurred in August 2010, when an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun and caught fire. It carried 96 people and 44 of them died. Investigators blamed pilot error.
———
Kang reported 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 airlines writer David Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report.
Pilots flying plane near speed of sound
didn’t answer traffic controllers
By Alan Levin and Mary Schlangenstein
March 23, 2022 —
Pilots of a doomed China Eastern Airlines flight failed to respond to calls from air-traffic controllers after tipping into a deadly nosedive, authorities said, as the search of the crash site was halted due to rain.
The Boeing 737-800 was travelling at close to the speed of sound in the moments before it slammed into a hillside, according to a Bloomberg News review of flight-track data.
Such an impact may complicate the task for investigators because it can obliterate evidence and, in rare cases, damage a plane’s data and voice recorders that are designed to withstand most crashes.
Rescuers work at the site of the plane crash in Tengxian County in southern China before rains topped the search.CREDIT:XINHUA/AP
The Boeing Co. 737-800 was knifing through the air at more than 966km/h, and at times may have exceeded 1100km/h, according to data from Flightradar24, a website that tracks planes.
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 1235km/h at sea level but slows with altitude as air temperature goes down and is about 1067km/h at 35,000 feet (10,668 metres).
Video footage run by China’s CCTV showed debris marked by numbers at the site of the crash.CREDIT:CCTV/AP
Flight 5735 was flying to Guangzhou from Kunming with 132 people on board at an altitude of about 29,000 feet when it began a sudden descent, according to data transmitted by the plane and captured by Flightradar24. The jetliner was cruising at about 957km/h before the dive.
The speed data is consistent with videos appearing to show the jet diving at a steep angle in the moments before impact and indicates that it likely hit the ground with huge force.
“It was an exceedingly high-energy crash,” said Bob Mann, president of RW Mann & Co consultancy, who did not participate in the speed analysis. “It looks like it literally evaporated into a crater. Do the flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder or quick access recorder - do any survive? I just don’t know the answer.”
Modern black-box recorders, which store data on computer chips, have a good record of survival in high-velocity crashes, said James Cash, who formerly served as the US National Transportation Safety Board’s chief technical adviser for recorders.
“The hard part is going to be finding it,” Cash said.
Debris is surrounded by police tape at the crash site.CREDIT:CCTV/AP
The circuit boards storing the data often break loose from the recorder’s protective exterior. But data can usually be extracted even if they’re damaged, he said.
“It’s probably embedded in the ground somewhere,” he said. “But I would suspect it would be O.K.”
Search halted
Search and rescue efforts at the crash site were halted on Wednesday due to rain, Chinese state media reported, with footage on news channel CCTV showing a drenched, muddy road and idled bulldozers. The TV reporter said there was still the smell of fuel in the area.
The rain means small landslides are possible, drainage work is required, and the aircraft’s black boxes still haven’t been found, according to CCTV.
Torrential rain is forecast in the crash area, which may impede rescue efforts, Xinhua News Agency reported. High winds are also expected. Caixin said weather conditions were good at the time of the crash, citing an official from China’s meteorological administration.
No beacon activated
Zhu Tao, an official with the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said at a briefing on Tuesday that the recorders had not been recovered. Searchers won’t be aided by a beacon or “ping” from the devices because they are only activated underwater.
Personal items found amongst debris from China plane crash
He said air traffic controllers tried multiple times to reach the pilots after the plane tipped into the deadly dive but received no response to their calls.
The two recorders on the China Eastern 737-800 - a cockpit voice recorder and another that captures flight data - were supplied by the aerospace division of Honeywell International Inc. and installed on the plane when it was new, according to company spokesman Adam Kress
Crash investigators have over decades perfected the examination of wreckage in search of clues, but some impacts can obliterate evidence. The crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max in 2019 was traced back to a sensor on the plane’s nose, but the sensor was never found after the jet hit the ground at a high speed, according to a preliminary report from that nation.
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Accident investigators should be able to find more precise speed data from the jet’s flight recorder. If it isn’t available for some reason, aerodynamic experts can perform extensive analysis to more closely estimate speed.
Flightradar24’s data includes the jet’s speed, but it’s measured horizontally across the ground. Bloomberg’s computations give a rough idea of how fast it was flying through the air by taking into account its horizontal speed over the ground as well as how fast it was descending.
The speed estimates were based on how fast the jet travelled between two points and didn’t take into account wind direction or other atmospheric conditions. The Bloomberg review was conservative and actual speeds may be higher.
While unverified videos showed the plane diving at a steep angle near the ground, it wasn’t clear how fast it was travelling at impact. The last data transmission captured by Flightradar24 occurred at about 3200 feet altitude.
About 40 seconds before the last transmission, the jet stopped descending and briefly climbed before resuming the dive. During these later stages of the flight, it slowed somewhat, according to the preliminary review.
It was still flying far faster than normal. Typically, jets don’t go above 288 mph at altitudes below 10,000 feet. The China Eastern jet was travelling at roughly 470 mph or more at those altitudes, according to Flightradar24 data.
Bloomberg
China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735: world
leaders express sympathy for crash victims
Condolences come from around the globe – including both Russia and the US, whose air safety body is helping investigate why the Boeing 737-800 came down
No survivors have been found yet after the plane plunged to the ground over the southern region of Guangxi
Jack Lau
Published 23 Mar, 2022
Flight data suggests China Eastern plane pulled out of one dive before crash
Wreckage from the plane after it crashed into a hillside in southern China.
The crash of China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 on Monday with 132 people on board has prompted condolences from around the world.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his sympathy via a Weibo post from the embassy in Beijing that read: “Please accept my most heartfelt condolences. Russia feels the pain of those who have lost their families in this tragedy.”
Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping established what they call a “no-limits” friendship at a summit ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in February and have maintained close ties despite extensive sanctions being imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
China Eastern Airlines, one of the country’s leading carriers, has yet to make any announcement about casualties. None of the 123 passengers and nine crew have been found so far.
The airline said the plane lost contact above Wuzhou, a city in the southern region of Guangxi around 210km (130 miles) from the intended destination, Guangzhou.
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 showed the Boeing 737-800 cruising at around 8,900 metres (29,200ft) before it suddenly lost height, reaching a speed of around 9,450 metres per minute in the moments before crashing.
Experts study video and flight data seeking clues into China Eastern crash
23 Mar 2022
The US diplomatic mission in China also expressed its deepest condolences. “We are ready to assist in investigation efforts and wish to share our admiration and respect for the emergency responders at the crash site.
“Please accept our heartfelt sympathies at this very difficult time,” David Meale, the chargé d’affaires, wrote in a statement on the embassy website.
The National Transportation Safety Board, the US flight safety regulator, has appointed a representative to help with the Chinese investigation into the cause of the crash.
Boeing, the plane’s manufacturer, has also offered to help and is in discussions with the US safety board, which routinely helps foreign investigations into crashes involving US-made or registered planes. The US Federal Aviation Authority and CFM International, the engine manufacturer, are also offering technical advice.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen also offered her condolences through a spokesman on Monday night. “This is a very big tragedy and we feel greatly sorry about it. We are willing to give all assistance necessary,” the island’s premier, Su Tseng-chang, said on Tuesday.
China Eastern crash investigators seek clues from flight data and video of plane’s final moments
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which charts cross-strait policies, also expressed its condolences and later said it had received confirmation that there were no Taiwanese on board.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also said on Twitter that he was keeping the families, friends and loved ones of those on board MU5735 in his thoughts.
Leaders in Europe and Asia have also conveyed their sympathies. Italian President Sergio Mattarella sent a letter to Xi expressing condolences on behalf of the Italian people, while British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote on Twitter that his thoughts were with the families of those caught up in the crash and the emergency response team.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, also expressed deep condolences.
Air tragedy in China after a decade of aviation safety
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In Singapore, the foreign ministry expressed “our condolences to the families of the passengers and crew on board the flight” and offered to support Beijing with search and rescue efforts.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was deeply shocked and saddened, writing on Twitter: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the crash and their family members.”
Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, tweeted: “We share the grief of our Chinese brothers and sisters and convey our deepest condolences and sympathies with the bereaved families.”
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