Six years on, families demand new search for missing Malaysia Airlines plane

PUTRAJAYA (Reuters) - Six years since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from radars, relatives of the 239 people who were on board are calling on authorities to revive efforts to find the missing plane.


Badges are displayed during the sixth annual remembrance event for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in Putrajaya, Malaysia, March 7, 2020. REUTERS/Lim Huey Teng

The fate of flight MH370 became one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries when it disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Repeated searches for the aircraft were called off in 2018.

Holding star-shaped signs reading “Never give up”, “Waiting”, and “Resume the search”, the relatives of those who were on the flight marked the sixth anniversary of their disappearance by making a fresh appeal for answers.

“The pain is still the same, the fact that the plane is still missing is still the same, and the fact that we don’t know what happened to the plane is still the same, “ said Grace Nathan, a lawyer whose mother was on the flight, during the event in Malaysia’s administrative capital, Putrajaya.

“There are more questions than there are answers and that shouldn’t be the case after six years,” she told reporters after the event.

A piece of aircraft debris, believed to be from the missing plane, was on display at the gathering.

Malaysia, China and Australia ended a two-year, A$200 million ($132.90 million) underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2017 after finding no trace of the plane.

In 2018, Malaysia contracted U.S. firm Ocean Infinity to resume the search on a “no-cure, no-fee”-basis, meaning it would pay the firm up to $70 million if it found the plane. But the 138-day search was also fruitless.

“We depend a lot on the government to take some initiative. We want the government to come forward and say that they are open to companies coming to search,” Nathan said, calling for the government to engage Ocean Infinity again.

Last month, the Transport Ministry said it had not received any new credible evidence to initiate a new search following a report that a fresh effort to find the plane could be mounted.

Meanwhile, Najib Razak, who was prime minister when MH370 disappeared, said he hoped the new government would restart search efforts.

“We spent a lot of money looking for the plane... But unfortunately, we couldn’t locate it,” Najib told Reuters during an interview on Wednesday,

“There is no finality to what actually happened,” he said.

Both Najib and former Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai have dismissed claims by former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott that the tragedy was a murder-suicide by the pilot.

IT WAS NOT MURDER SUICIDE IT WAS A WATERSPOUT

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MH370

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=WATERSPOUT

 Looking At Russia-Ukraine Is Like Thinking About The Still-Missing Malaysian MH370 Airplane: Who Has The Truth? – Essay

 March 7, 2022 

By Dr. Azly Rahma

Last week I wrote these notes as I was thinking of the world, in preparation for a lecture on Sustainability, Human Rights, and Peace and Justice.  I wanted to also read the mind of political journalists as they take sides reporting, as they interrogate their subjectivities, question their biases, and acknowledge their human-ness and their idea of “what-am-I-objective-against?”, and as their stories paid by the pied piper residing in corporations or the State. Unless they have their own forum independent of these controls, and they answer only to their souls.

So, my notes are essentially philosophical and in the next section, I present the Marxist dimension of writing, the “cui-bono” (who-benefits?) notion, and how as a case study can be applied to the still-missing Malaysian airline MH370.

Random Notes on Ukraine

WE CAN NEVER KNOW the truth about Russia-Ukraine. Who is right? Or wrong. Truth: We can only take sides based on what is told.

IF EUROPE SENDS PEOPLE to fight in Ukraine, it will be a bloody mess. Prelude to World War III. Putin knows Machiavelli well.

LEARN TO ANALYZE ISSUES like blind men and an elephant. Only this time the eyes of the blind are now wide open. Kaleidoscopic.

“TRUTH” How we construct this depends on the method we use. Truth and Method. How we see things depends on how we view ourselves.

TRUTH. One cannot see God, therefore use metaphors, personification, semiotics of representation. Creations abound, hence.

TRUTH. Sociological paradigms – Structural Functionalism, Critical Theory, Symbolic Interactionism. Now limiting. Need new way.

TRUTH. All the more subjective now. Post-truth. Pseudo-truth. New versions emerge. TRUTH is personal, elusive.

TRUTH. We live by metaphors. Organizations by those too. Cultural perspectives matter in seeing through “truth”.

TRUTH. Invasion of Ukraine might not be an invasion after all. From multivariate-alternate perspective.

TRUTH. In an age of everchanging complexity of media and production of its artifacts of perception-crafting, truth disappears.

TRUTH. What matters existentially, is the truth of one’s existence & how psycho-socio-neurology within functions in crafting truth.

TRUTH. In the life of our mind, why must we consume other people’s truth — about religion, God, politics, fate and free will?

TRUTH? Not just a concept ideologized, but production of consciousness-manipulating neurons that become us.

TRUTH? We are truth within ourselves. Unto us. But necessary to step outside of this realm to see the truth from a vantage point.

TRUTH. Not a question of “what is REALITY”. Rather, how real is real? A philosophical theme of inquiry.

TRUTH. Platonic Theory of Forms attempts to illuminate the truth and perception and reality problematique.

TRUTH. Of the religious scriptures. Are they alive? Or words read to be made alive? Hence, “living words”? Complex notion.

TRUTH. Do we read the world? Or let the world read and write us, inscribing our consciousness with externalities of “truth”?

TRUTH. Is reality. Is language. Is consciousness. These are complex concepts in themselves. Hence the existential issue of language.

Still, where is MH370 – the Malaysian airplane?

Towards looking at Ukraine I remember what I wrote on Malaysia’s missing airplane.

The following is based on a minor-edited version of my analysis:

Thinking of the still-missing Malaysian airplane, contemplating on a Marxist theory of informational diffusion, I came up with these random notes on media oligopoly I am sharing in this week’s column:

Information wants to be free and wishes to leave the shackle of control and the kingdom of officialdom.

Marx once said that whoever owns the means of production owns/controls (re: Vladimir Lenin’s classic essay on ‘commanding heights’,) and control the production of consciousness, and further controls the evolution of the act of knowing and the contents of what is to be known because what is known is produced as artifacts with politics of control structuring them.

CNN, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, Time-Warner AOL, and media corporations controls the production of what is to be known, albeit appearing to be producing “objectivity” hidden under the shibboleth of “liberal-democracy” whilst in essence governed by the hegemony of the tightly-controlled news and informational oligarchic empire of consciousness-production.

This might sound like a (Noam) Chomskyian analysis of the post-modern, post-information age paradigm of media production re: the reporting of the missing MH370. It could as well be a Chomskyian view in need of a further work of deconstructionism.

There are classes of control of knowledge-production and those producing information in the ongoing reporting of MH370.

Level 1:

Those who know the whereabouts of the aircraft, such as leaders of the game, such as presidents and prime ministers playing the role of ‘chief-of-staff of armed forces’, etc. in collaboration with the warrior-commander-Kshatriya class and the most elite of the intelligence unit and working in tandem and alliance with military and supra-intelligence allies, the secret must be kept (from Edward Snowden or Julian Assange) as long as the national and international security is safeguarded – the plot must be kept intact and the show must go on…

Level 2:

Those who know the “unsealed part of the story” will be playing the role of making sure the world and the public know what’s happening, in the name of freedom to know and freedom to profit from conflict or even the manufacture of conflict. The philosophy of news reporting is simple: live and breathe the paradigm of liberal-capitalist informational democracy through sound-bite and blitzkrieg- technologies of cognitive dissonance and funnel in as much as possible issues versus non-issues and speculations and half-truths to feed the four-eyed viewers who are starved for information and drowned in speculations.

That’s the role of the media, whether in America or in Malaysia. The longer one gets glued to the TV, the higher the ratings, the more big advertisers will pour in money.

But the media will only be allowed to view a certain amount of secrecy.

CNN will not talk about speculations that the US government and its media and military ideological apparatuses know what is happening and perhaps instead the focus will be on the incompetency (rightly so…) of the Malaysian government in handling this with her bumbling and fumbling technology and techniques of handling security (again, rightly so… with all these flip-flops, contradictory statements, and true-false vacillation of official reporting, and those elusive and informational-hide-and-seek-and-peekaboo type of reporting we hear since day one of the mystery unfolding.

That’s what the media is good at and will profit from. To report on speculations that the army or the government is perhaps involved in a huge cover-up will not be good – it will mean a media kamikaze of epic instant death proportions.

CNN will report on the human side of the story, bringing in expert after expert, lullabying viewers with a thesis-antithesis-synthesis fiesta of media party and focus on by the minute day-to-day coverage of the search for an object in many vast oceanic haystacks… the rescuers and commanders of the search and rescue and recovery team do not have access to the “sealed information” on what actually happened and what is still happening

The sealed information lies with those in Level 1 above. Those searching are committed to their search and doing their job for the country and for the family and in the name of solving a most mind-boggling mystery (although Google Earth can photograph your car’s plate number from outer space).

From the point of view of revenue generation, the longer the search, the more each team can charge the Malaysian government. As of today (when this article was written) the United States has spent an equivalent of perhaps US$5 million to be billed to the Malaysian government sooner or later.

Level 3:

Of the owners of knowledge of what happened to MH370 are the classes of people who had consumed the information produced by those in Level 2.

In essence, there is both chaos and structure, and complexity and simplicity in the way we understand the kaleidoscopic and fractal nature of informational flow.

And who would Marx pronounce as the winner in this informational war, a Mahabharata of media mayhem of the construction of reality?

Not human beings. But technology. Media technology. Manipulated by the Military-Industrial Complex. The Frankenstein of our Orwellian World of 1984 inhabited by members of the Animal Farm.

Welcome to our global village.

***

That was my Chaos Theory-inspired analysis of the missing airplane.

How do we look at the Russian-Ukraine issue then?  

In other words, as an educator teaching about global issues, do I take sides when the information will never be enough for me to have an informed opinion, and that my job is to make my students think and teach them how to think and not what to think, as the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey would suggest – how do I do this while still remain a human being with philosophical sensibilities as exemplified by the questions I had at the beginning of this writing?

Herein lie the idea of teaching students how to “look at a butterfly” flapping its wings in the Amazon jungle some 100 years ago, and using scientific thinking discern the nature of global issues and world politics, taking into consideration the kaleidoscopic, multidimensional, fractal-geometric nature of events unfolding and how these have their origins which have origins and origins ad nauseum!

I suppose that is how we ought to look at the Russian-Ukraine issue and explore alternate and multivariate perspectives. From the philosophical, ideological, political-economic, strategic, leader-ego-centric, and of course geopolitical-strategic issues. Complex interlocking-directorateship of ideas we need to untangle and yet we will never find the right answer. We can only accept ones that will be comforting to us.

Could this be the reason why the United States primarily have not decided to declare war on Russia and instead, in the meantime plan to beef up NATO with arms (as a lucrative business of the US military-industrial-complex) and to be fair, to avoid a situation as such as Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis?

I don’t know. As Socrates would say.

Because Vladimir Putin is a realist.

As real as the literary approaches of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Solzhenitsyn.

As real as Lenin.

And Stalin.

Dr. Azly Rahman is an academician, educator, international columnist, and author of nine books He holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in international education development and Master's degrees in six areas: education, international affairs, peace studies, communication, fiction, and non-fiction writing. He is a member of the Columbia University chapter of the Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. Twitter @azlyrahman. More writings here. His latest book, a memoir, is published by Penguin Books is available here.

THUMBNAIL Malaysia's MH370 in 2011 photo by Laurent ERRERA, Wikipedia Commons.

Mystery of missing Malaysia MH370 flight: Fresh hope kindles as govt plans to renew search

It has been 10 years since the flight's disappearance

Web Desk Updated: March 03, 2024 

Families of passengers from both China and Malaysia, who were aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, are seen during a remembrance event commemorating the 10th anniversary of its disappearance, in Subang Jaya, Malaysia 

Ten years after the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines MH370 flight, the government on Sunday said it has plans to renew the search after a US technology firm proposed a fresh hunt in the southern Indian Ocean, where the plane is believed to have crashed.

While speaking at a remembrance event to mark the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of the flight, Transport Minister Anthony Loke said the government is keen to locate MH370.

Texas-based Ocean Infinity has proposed another no find, no fee basis to scor the seabeds as an expansion from where it first searched in 2018.

He said he invited the company to meet and evaluate the new scientific evidence.

"If it is credible, will seek Cabinet's approval to sign a new contract with Ocean Infinity," he added.

The Boeing 777 plane carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished from radar shortly after taking off on March 8, 2014.

Since then all the searches by the government failed to unravel the mystery behind its disappearance.

Ocean Infinity-led searches before had found no clues, however, its proposed new search plan was delayed last year.

The government is yet to finalise the deal as the fee negotiation is not yet over. He said financial cost is not an issue and that he doesn't foresee any hindrances for the search to proceed if all goes well.

The announcement of the renewed search has sparked hope in at least some family members. "We have been on a roller coaster for the last 10 years... If it is not found, I hope that it will continue with another search," Jacquita Gomes, whose flight attendant husband was on the plane, was quoted by the Associated Press.

She also added that it will pave for a full closure.

Family members of passengers from Malaysia, Australia, China and India paid tribute to their loved ones during the event, lighting a candle on stage to remember them.

MY THEORY 

 

MH370

Beijing court begins hearings for Chinese relatives of people on Malaysia Airlines plane

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

November 27, 2023

Hu Xiufang, whose son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter were on the missing MH370, hold a banner in Beijing, Nov. 27, 2023. The banner reads 'Malaysian Airline MH370 case.' (AP Photo)

BEIJING--A Beijing court began compensation hearings Monday morning for Chinese relatives of people who died on a Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared in 2014 on a flight to Beijing, a case that remains shrouded in mystery after almost a decade.

Security was tight around the Chinese capital’s main Chaoyang District Intermediary Court and no detailed information was immediately available. Police checked the identities of journalists onsite and sequestered them in a cordoned-off area. Reporters were able to see relatives enter the court but were unable to speak with them before the hearing began.

Various theories have emerged about the fate of the plane, including mechanical failure, a hijacking attempt or a deliberate effort to scuttle it by those in the cockpit, but scant evidence has been found to show why the plane diverted from its original route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Boeing 777 with 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard is believed to have plunged into the Southern Ocean south of India but months of intense searching found no sign of where it went down and only fragments of the plane have washed up on beaches in the area.

Among the passengers onboard, 153 or 154 by differing accounts were citizens of China, causing the disaster to resonate especially in Beijing, where daily briefings and vigils were held for those missing. Some relatives refused to believe the plane had disappeared, believing it had been taken to an unknown site and that their loved ones remained alive, and refused a accept relatively small compassionate payments from the airline.

Details of the lawsuit remain cloudy but appear to be based on the contention that the airline failed to take measures to locate the plane after it disappeared from air traffic control about 38 minutes after takeoff over the South China Sea on the night March 8, 2014.

Relatives have been communicating online and say they expect the hearings to extend to mid-December

Given the continuing mystery surrounding the case, it remains unclear what financial obligations the airline may have and no charges have been brought against the flight crew. However, relatives say they wish for some compensation for a disaster that deprived them of their loved ones and placed them in financial difficulty.

China’s largely opaque legal system offers wide latitude for judges to issue legal or financial penalties when criminal penalties cannot be brought.

Similar cases brought in the U.S. against the airline, its holding company and insurer have been dismissed on the basis that such matters should be handled by the Malaysian legal system.

China itself says it is still investigating the cause of the crash of a China Eastern Airlines jetliner that killed 132 people on March 21, 2022. The disaster was a rare failure for a Chinese airline industry that dramatically improved safety following deadly crashes in the 1990s.

The Boeing 737-800 en route from Kunming in the southwest to Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, went into a nosedive from 8,800 meters (29,000 feet), appeared to recover and then slammed into a mountainside.

 Large waterspout caught on camera off Florida coast

Sept. 2 (UPI) -- A waterspout swirling water high up into the air off the Florida coast was caught on camera by a witness Friday morning.

Bryan Shepherd captured video when he spotted the weather phenomenon off the coast of New Smyrna Beach about 8:15 a.m. Friday.

The waterspout followed an early morning thunderstorm and comes amid several days of strong storms in Central Florida.

Weather forecasters said the storms are expected to continue through Friday

I BELIEVE THAT IT WAS A WATERSPOUT THAT TOOK DOWN FLIGHT MH370

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for MH370 

UPDATED

ANOTHER AIRPLANE CRASH ANOMALY!

IT WENT STRAIGHT DOWN FROM 30,000 FT. LIKE MH370

WHERE ARE THE BODIES?

 Rescuers have not yet been able to find any dead or survivors of the China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 crash. The plane crashed yesterday in the mountains of Teng County, Wuzhou City in southern China.

“To date, according to rescuers, the wreckage of the crashed aircraft has been found at the scene, but no missing persons have yet been found”, - China Central Television said in a report dated 4:50 Moscow time.

The search is currently ongoing. They are complicated by the difficulties associated with the landscape - the mountainous terrain greatly complicates the work of rescuers.

It's worth reminding that the plane was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou. A fire broke out at the crash site. Rescuers went to the crash site.

'Catastrophic incident on board' Chinese plane sparked death plunge, expert says

22 March 2022, 10:51

Footage appeared to show the moment a passenger plane crashed into a mountain in China. Picture: Social media/Alamy

By Emma Soteriou

The plane crash in China that claimed 132 lives could have been caused by a "catastrophic incident" on board the flight, an expert analyst has told LBC.

Nobody survived the devastating crash in which the passenger plane plunged thousands of feet from the sky in an almost vertical freefall.

Speaking to LBC, expert Sally Gethin explained how the Boeing 737 suddenly dropped from the sky after an apparent attempt to 'level off' its flightpath, and detailed what could have be the reason behind the disaster.

"It's really hard to ascertain at this point in time whether the aircraft was entirely intact when it dropped so suddenly," she said.

"I would tend to think that there had already been a catastrophic incident on board for it to be able to drop so dramatically in that way.

"But at the same time, it could also be a problem that the pilot was struggling with and finally lost control."

Despite speculation, Ms Gethin said the real reason behind the crash would hopefully be uncovered when the two black boxes - the data recorder and the voice recorder - are uncovered from the wreckage.

"[It] will be revealed in their communications with the radar control, with their traffic management side, and that will be revealed in the voice recorder," she said.

Read more: Horrifying moment plane with 132 passengers 'nosedives' into Chinese mountain

Read more: No survivors found after plane nosedives into mountainside in China

When asked about unverified footage showing a plane nosediving, she explained: "[The plane] was at nearly 30,000 feet - which is cruising altitude - and from the ground that would look like a dot up in the sky.

"It fell from that height – nearly 30,000 feet – suddenly perpendicular.

"It maintained some stability, it paused and then several seconds later it then dropped again suddenly.

"That footage captures it in that second phase, where it drops completely vertically to the ground."

She went on to say: "The impact of the crash ruled out survivors because there was no chance to land it in a gradual way."

China Searches for Victims, Flight Recorders After First Plane Crash in 12 years

Chinese media carried brief highway video images from a vehicle's dashboard camera that appeared to show a jet diving to the ground at an angle of about 35 degrees from the vertical.

Paramilitary police officers work at the site where a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane flying from Kunming to Guangzhou crashed, in Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China March 21, 2022. 

Photo: China Daily via Reuters

Wuzhou: Rescuers scoured heavily forested mountain slopes in southern China on Tuesday looking for victims and flight recorders from a China Eastern Airlines passenger jet that crashed a day earlier with 132 people on board.

“Parts of the Boeing 737-800 were strewn among trees charred by fire after China’s first crash of a commercial jetliner since 2010. Burnt remains of identity cards and wallets were also seen,” state media said.

Flight MU5735 was travelling to the port city of Guangzhou from Kunming, capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, when it suddenly plunged from cruising altitude and crashed in the mountains of Guangxi less than an hour before it was due to land.

Chinese media carried brief highway video images from a vehicle’s dashboard camera that appeared to show a jet diving to the ground at an angle of about 35 degrees from the vertical. Reuters could not immediately verify the footage.

Si, 64, a villager near the crash site who declined to give his first name, told Reuters he heard a “bang, bang” at the time of the crash.

“It was like thunder,” he said.

Plane debris is seen at the site where a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane flying from Kunming to Guangzhou crashed, in Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China March 21, 2022.

 Photo: China Daily via Reuters

State media, which described the situation as “grim”, have said the possibility of the deaths of all on board could not be ruled out.

The crash site was hemmed in by mountains on three sides, state media said, with just one tiny path providing access. Rain was forecast in the area this week. Excavators were clearing a path to the site on Tuesday, images on state television showed.

Earlier, video images from the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, showed search and rescue workers and paramilitary forces scaling tree-covered hillocks and placing markers wherever debris was found.

Police set up a checkpoint at Lu village, on the approach to the site, and barred journalists from entering.

Several people gathered near the crash site on Tuesday for a small Buddhist ceremony.

Abrupt Descent

An investigation team sent by the State Council, or cabinet, will give details of the search and rescue effort and the hunt for the black boxes at a news conference on Tuesday evening, state television said.

The last commercial jetliner to crash in China was in 2010, when an Embraer E-190 regional jet flown by Henan Airlines went down, killing 44 of the 96 aboard.

Militia members speak with a manager at the entrance of Lu village near the site where the China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane crashed, March 22, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

Highlighting the top-level concern, Vice Premier Liu He went to Guangxi on Monday night to oversee search and rescue operations.

The disaster comes as planemaker Boeing seeks to rebound from several crises, notably the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on air travel and safety concerns over its 737 MAX model following two deadly crashes.

Once it is found, the cockpit voice recorder could yield clues to what went wrong with Monday’s flight.

“Accidents that start at cruise altitude are usually caused by weather, deliberate sabotage, or pilot error,” Dan Elwell, a former head of US regulator the Federal Aviation Administration, told Reuters.

Elwell, who led the FAA during the 737-MAX crisis, said mechanical failures in modern commercial jets were rare at cruise altitude.

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Monday appointed an investigator, as the Boeing aircraft was produced in the United States, but it was unclear if the investigator would travel to China.

On Monday, China Eastern and two subsidiaries grounded its fleet of 737-800 planes. The group has 225 of the aircraft, data from British aviation consultancy IBA shows.

As of Tuesday, other Chinese airlines had yet to cancel any flights that use 737-800 aircraft, according to data from Chinese aviation data provider Flight Master.

Among the passengers on flight MU5735 was the chief financial officer of Dinglong Culture, a Guangzhou-headquartered firm whose businesses range from entertainment to titanium mining.

A provincial daily cited a woman as saying six of her family members and friends were on the flight to Guangzhou, where they had been due to attend a funeral.

Onshore-listed shares of China Eastern slumped over 6.5% on Tuesday, while those trading in Hong Kong fell nearly 6%.

China Eastern crash: ‘Foul play at the top of the list’ says air crash investigator

By Eryk Bagshaw
Updated March 22, 2022 

Singapore: A leading air crash investigator says foul play should be at the top of the list for authorities investigating the crash of China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735, after the flight’s almost vertical descent matched the fate of two previous disasters.

Michael Daniel, who worked on investigations into Egypt Air flight 990 and SilkAir flight 185, which were both deliberately crashed by the pilot - according to the US National Transportation Safety Board - also had “very quick, very sudden and straight” dives straight into the ground.

Debris seen at the crash site in Guangxi. CREDIT:AP

“I think that’d be one of the first things I would look at is foul play,” said Daniel.

The US Federal Aviation Administration investigator said the plane had power as it was descending. “So, that kind of rules out a catastrophic type of failure,” he said.

“Even with catastrophic failures, a lot of times you’ll see some opportunity for declaring an emergency, or mayday or, or something along those lines. There’s nothing that’s been released here that indicates any kind of distress call. ”

Daniel, the senior policy manager at consultancy firm Aviation Insight, said if the horizontal stabiliser, which controls the vertical balance of the aircraft, was stuck, you would still likely see some wavering on the plane.

But MU5735 fell almost 8000 metres in two minutes, FlightRadar 24 data shows, plunging at such a speed that parts of the plane fell off as it hurtled towards the mountains that surround Wuzhou in southeastern China. Video on social media sites from a mining CCTV camera and a car dashcam appeared to show the plane plunging nose-first from the sky into the ground before sending up a plume of smoke that could be seen up to five kilometres away.

There were 132 people on board. Chinese authorities have not reported any survivors almost 24 hours after the flight took off from Kunming to Guangzhou. Emergency workers have recovered burnt ID documents and wallets from the site.
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Families of the passengers and crew have descended on Kunming and Guangzhou airports hoping for good news but so far have only received statements from the Civil Aviation Administration of China that a rescue effort was ongoing.

A worker from the China Eastern holds a signboard waiting to lead relatives of the victims aboard China Eastern’s flight MU5735 to a cordoned off area, in Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport in Guangzhou.

CREDIT:CHINATOPIX/AP

Other air crash investigators and aviation safety analysts have been puzzled by the flights’ trajectory while warning it was too early to say what the cause of the accident was. The Boeing 737-800 has a good safety record.

“It’s an odd profile,” John Cox, an aviation safety consultant and former 737 pilot told Bloomberg. “It’s hard to get the airplane to do this.”

The former director of the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety, Jean-Paul Troadec, told Agence France-Presse that the flight data was “very unusual,” but added that it was “far too early” to draw conclusions.

The passengers on board the flight were cruising at an altitude of 8840 metres for one hour and ten minutes before the sudden dive, 160 kilometres from their destination.

“I think there’s a good chance that there were people that were still alive prior to impact,” said Daniel.

The g-force of the drop may have knocked some passengers and crew out. “This thing fell so quickly, so steeply, I don’t see how anybody would have had any opportunity to don emergency masks,” he said.



Play video
Plane with 132 people on board crashes in rural China

Play video

China faces its worst air disaster in three decades after a plane carrying 132 people plunged into mountains in the country’s south-east.

The task for investigators now is to reach the crash site. There is only one path into the dense mountain terrain, where the impact of the crash has created a crater that may make it hard to retrieve the black box, which houses critical data of the moments leading up to the crash.

“Access to the remote area will be a challenge, recovery will be a challenge, transparency perhaps could be a challenge,” said Daniel.

“You’ll have a team that will look at the human factors part of the investigation. They’ll do a look back on the flight crew back even several days to see what the behaviour was, where they were, what they were doing, what their attitude was.”

RELATED ARTICLE
Tragedy
Rescuers comb forest for survivors from flight MU5735

The investigation is being led by the Civil Aviation Administration of China. The US Federal Aviation Authority and Boeing said on Tuesday they were prepared “to assist in investigation efforts”.

Chinese Air Travel Faces Mass Cancellations After Plane Crash

Bloomberg News, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- About 74% of the 11,800 flights scheduled in China on Tuesday have been canceled, including the majority due between Beijing and Shanghai, typically one of the world’s busiest domestic routes, according to VariFlight. 

Chinese air travel had already been hit by Covid-related restrictions, which led to a high level of cancellations, but Tuesday’s rate was still the highest this year and double the number at the start of the month, data from the Chinese aviation data company show. 

The cancellations come after a Boeing Co. 737-800 NG operated by China Eastern Airlines Corp. nosedived out of the sky and crashed in Guangxi province on Monday afternoon. There were 132 people on board and no survivors have been found. It was the first fatal air crash in China since 2010. 

Of the 35 flights from Shanghai’s Hongqiao Airport to Beijing listed for Tuesday, two operated in the morning and three more were due to fly. All others were scrapped. Only five of the 34 flights from Beijing to Shanghai’s domestic hub were scheduled to operate.

China Eastern shares slid as much as 7.3% in Hong Kong following a 6.5% loss on Monday. They also dropped as much as 9.3% in Shanghai trading Tuesday morning, the worst performers on a Bloomberg gauge of Asia-Pacific airline stocks. Boeing fell 3.6% in New York on Monday. 

Details of crashed Boeing 737-800 and China Eastern Airlines

2022/3/21 17:17 (GMT)
© Reuters


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Here are some facts about the Boeing 737-800 jet and China Eastern Airlines, involved in a crash on a domestic flight on Monday with 132 people on board.

BOEING 737-800

The Boeing 737-800 is part of the 737 family, the world's most-flown commercial aircraft series. It was developed in the 1960s to serve short- or medium-length routes.

The 737-800 is part of the 737 NG or Next-Generation family - with more than 7,000 delivered since 1993 - and it has a strong safety record after nearly three decades of flights. The 162- to 189-seat 737-800 was launched on Sept. 5, 1994. The NG is the predecessor to the 737 MAX.

The MAX was grounded worldwide for 20 months after two fatal crashes killed 346. It remains grounded in China.

The jet involved in the China Eastern accident, en route from the southwestern city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, was six years old, according to Flightradar24.

In the United States, American Airlines has the most 737-800s in operation with 265 followed by Southwest Airlines with 205 and United Airlines with 136, according to Cirium data.

The last fatal 737-800 crash occurred in August 2020 when an Air India Express plane overshot the table-top runway and crashed while landing at Calicut International Airport in the southern state of Kerala in heavy rain, killing 21. A government report cited pilot error as the probable cause.

CHINA

China's airline safety record has been among the best in the world for a decade but is less transparent than in countries like the United States and Australia where regulators release detailed reports on non-fatal incidents.

According to Aviation Safety Network, China's last fatal jet accident was in 2010, when 44 of 96 people on board were killed when an Embraer E-190 regional jet flown by Henan Airlines crashed on approach to Yichun airport.

In 1994, a China Northwest Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 crashed en route from Xian to Guangzhou, killing all 160 on board in China's worst-ever air disaster, according to Aviation Safety Network.

Monday's disaster was the first fatal crash for China Eastern since 2004, when a plane crashed shortly after it took off from an airport in north China, killing 55, according to ASN.

Shanghai-based China Eastern was created in 1988 and is one of the largest three airlines in China, with one of the youngest fleet of planes.

It is part of the SkyTeam Alliance and U.S. carrier Delta Air Lines holds a 2% stake. China Eastern has ranked in recent years among the ten largest carriers in total passengers carried. Delta has "a strategic joint marketing and commercial cooperation arrangement covering traffic flows between China and the U.S."

Passenger traffic between China and the United States has declined dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic.

(Reporting by David Shepardson and Rajesh Kumar Singh; Editing by Nick Macfie)

India puts Boeing 737 aircraft under surveillance after China crash

Air turbulence-- IT WAS NOT A 737 MAX-

By Niharika Sharma
Reporter

India has decided to put the Boeing 737 aircraft under “enhanced surveillance.”

The decision follows the crash yesterday (March 21) of one such plane belonging to China Eastern Airlines. It was carrying 132 people and crashed in Wuzhou city.

In India, SpiceJet, Vistara, and Air India Express use the Boeing 737.

“Flight safety is serious business and we are closely studying the situation,” Arun Kumar, chief of India’s directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA), told news agency PTI. “In the interim, we are focusing on enhanced surveillance of our 737 fleets.”

In 2019, India had grounded the Boeing 737 Max aircraft following accidents involving them between October 2018 and March 2019, killing up to 346 people. It was only after 27 months, in August 2021, that India allowed them to fly again.

Reacting to China’s incident, the US-based Boeing told Quartz that it was prepared to assist in the investigation being led by China’s civil aviation administration.

“Our thoughts are with the passengers and crew of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU 5735,” a Boeing spokesperson told Quartz in a statement. “We are working with our airline customers and are ready to support them.”

China Eastern Airlines crash: families await grim news as rescuers sift through wreckage


State media report no survivors after a Boeing 737-800 flight crashed into mountainous terrain with 132 on board

Rescuers sort through debris of China plane crash as family of victims gather at airport – video

Helen Davidson in Taipei
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 22 Mar 2022 05.28 GMT

About an hour into its journey from Kunming to Gaungzhou, flight MU5735 fell out of the air. After cruising at an altitude of 29,100ft, it suddenly dropped to about 7,000ft where it briefly ascended before diving again and crashing into remote bamboo forest in the mountains near Wuzhou. The fall appears to have taken around two minutes, according to flight tracking data.

“The plane did not smoke during the fall,” a witness told the Beijing Youth Daily. “The fire started after it fell into the mountain, followed by a lot of smoke.”

Villagers reported the sound of explosions and a raging fire. Some locals raced to the scene ahead of hundreds of fire and rescue personnel – and reportedly local militia groups – travelling the final distance on foot via a dirt trail.

Chinese plane with 132 people onboard crashes in Guangxi province

There has been no official announcement on the death toll, but state media has reported there were no signs of survivors.

Footage of the crash site showed a deep scar in the earth and indiscernible wreckage scattered across the area. A large piece of debris showed a partial sign of the China Eastern Airlines brand.

The flight was carrying 132 people, including nine crew members. ID cards and wallets have reportedly been found at the scene but the plane’s black box has yet to be located and the cause of the crash is not yet known. However some details about those onboard have begun to come through as families gathered at the plane’s destination airport in Guangdong, and the airline’s office in Yunnan. According to local reports, a group of six were heading to Guangzhou for a funeral. A woman who gave a pseudonym Chen, told Jimu News the six included her sister and best friend.

Another man, surnamed Yan, told Reuters a 29-year-old colleague was on the plane, and he was left to notify their mother. “When she picked up the phone, she choked up,” said Yan, adding that he had a “heavy heart” when he heard the news.

The first rescuers on the scene had to travel the final distance to the plane’s wreckage on foot.

 Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

Chinese media outlet The Paper reported another man, referred to as Liu Li, was on his way to Guangzhou from Kunming for a reunion with his family after they bought him a ticket. Another report described a young woman on her way to meet her fiance.

“We couldn’t reach her,” her brother said. “She should have been arriving at Guangzhou after two hours. Her fiance is waiting for her at Guangzhou airport, he couldn’t find her or reach her.”

Initial reports said there were 133 people aboard, a number which was later corrected after it emerged a passenger had cancelled their flight prior to boarding.

Authorities have established a huge presence near the crash site, with multiple first responder groups, trauma specialists, psychologists, government emergency coordinators, and media. Live coverage by state media shows villagers on motorbikes carrying rescue workers and supplies up the mountain trail to the scene.

The crash is China’s worst air disaster in at least a decade, and follows recent government praise for the industry’s vastly improved safety track record. The plane flying route MU5735 was not a Boeing 737 Max, which was grounded after two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, but a Boeing 737-800, one of the world’s most common passenger planes. China Eastern Airlines has grounded all of that model in its fleet, as investigations continue.

“Our thoughts are with the passengers and crew of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU 5735,” Boeing said in a statement. “We are working with our airline customer and are ready to support them.”

The cause of the plane crash, which caused a blaze on the mountainside, is not yet known.

Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

CCTV footage from a nearby mine, shared online and verified by Jimu News and the Wall Street Journal, purports to capture the plane’s horrifyingly steep final descent, plunging at just 35 degrees off vertical.

Aviation experts in the UK said there could be multiple reasons for the crash until further evidence emerged. Tony Cable, an air accident investigator, said possibilities included a “loss of control event” or high altitude stall. Crashes during the cruising period of a flight are rare.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, called for an all-out response and investigation. Hu Xijin, a former editor of the Global Times, China’s nationalistic tabloid, called for the company to keep people updated, perhaps referring to the public furore and eventual arrests after officials covered up the true extent of the death toll in last year’s Henan flood disaster. “Absolutely do not wait until the formal end of an investigation before notifying the public,” he said.

The airline said there were no foreign nationals among the passengers. Authorities in Taiwan – which China claims as a province against its stated status as an independent nation – are working to determine if any of its citizens were onboard.

Additional reporting by Chi Hui Lin and Xiaoqian Zhu

Hopes fade of finding survivors after China Eastern airlines crash

Issued on: 22/03/2022 

00:52Plane debris is seen at the site where a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane flying from Kunming to Guangzhou crashed, in Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China March 21, 2022. © China Daily via Reuters

Text by: NEWS WIRES

Rescuers in China scoured heavily forested slopes on Tuesday with hopes fading of finding any survivors from the 132 people aboard a China Eastern Airlines passenger jet that crashed a day earlier in the mountains of southern Guangxi.

Parts of the Boeing 737-800 jet were strewn across mountain slopes charred by fire after China’s first crash involving a commercial jetliner since 2010. Burnt remains of identity cards, purses and wallets were also seen, state media reported.

Flight MU5735 was en route from the southwestern city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to Guangzhou in Guangdong province bordering Hong Kong, when it suddenly plunged from cruising altitude at about the time when it would normally start to descend ahead of its landing.

Chinese media carried brief highway video footage from a vehicle’s dashcam apparently showing a jet diving to the ground behind trees at an angle of about 35 degrees off vertical. Reuters could not immediately verify the footage.

“The plane fell vertically from the sky,” state-run Beijing Youth Daily quoted a local resident as saying.

“Although I was far away, I could still see that it was a plane. The plane did not emit smoke during the fall. It fell into the mountains and started a fire.”

Lu, 64, a villager near the crash site who declined to provide his first name, told Reuters he heard a “bang, bang” at the time of the crash. “It was like thunder!” he said.

State media have described the situation as “grim”, and that the possibility of all onboard perishing could not be ruled out.

A working group from the Chinese aviation regulator was deployed to the crash site, alongside fire rescue and paramilitary forces.

Vice Premier Liu He left for Wuzhou city in Guangxi on Monday night to oversee the rescue efforts and crash investigation after an emergency government meeting.

State media described the crash site as being hemmed in by mountains on three sides, with access provided by just one tiny path. Rain was forecast for the area this week.

Authorities barred journalists and onlookers from approaching the site, keeping the road clear for emergency service vehicles.

Abrupt descent

U.S.-based aviation analyst Robert Mann of R.W. Mann & Company said investigators will need the flight data recorders to understand what might have caused the abrupt descent suggested by Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data. ADS-B is a technology that allows aircraft to be tracked.

The crash comes as Boeing seeks to rebound from several overlapping crises, including the coronavirus pandemic and crashes involving its 737 MAX model. The cockpit voice recorder could also yield clues to what went wrong once it is found.

“Accidents that start at cruise altitude are usually caused by weather, deliberate sabotage, or pilot error,” Dan Elwell, a former Federal Aviation Administration head, told Reuters.

Elwell, who led the FAA during the 737-MAX crisis, said mechanical failures in modern commercial jets were rare at cruise altitude.

China Eastern and two of its subsidiaries on Monday grounded its fleet of 737-800 planes, state media reported. The group has 225 of the aircraft, data from British aviation consultancy IBA shows.

Other Chinese airlines have yet to cancel any of their flights that use 737-800 aircraft as of Tuesday, according to data from Chinese aviation data provider Flight Master.

Onshore-listed shares of China Eastern slumped more than 6.5% on Tuesday, while those trading in Hong Kong fell nearly 6%.

Dinglong Culture, a Guangzhou-headquartered firm whose businesses range from entertainment to titanium mining, said on Tuesday its chief financial officer Fang Fang had been on the flight. The company said it was closely monitoring rescue developments and would arrange support for her family.

The last crash of a commercial jetliner in China was in 2010, when an Embraer E-190 regional jet flown by Henan Airlines crashed, killing 44 of 96 people on board.

(REUTERS)

How Could One of the World’s Favorite Jets Just Plunge to Earth Like a Ballistic Missile?

DIVE BOMB

In an age where every flight is instantly tracked, data and images of a journey that ended with 132 people dead have kicked off an extraordinary global guessing game.

Clive Irving
Published Mar. 21, 2022

WANG ZHAO/AFP via Getty Images

Aviation experts are baffled by data showing that a China Eastern Boeing 737-800 about to begin its descent to the city of Guangzhou suddenly plunged vertically to earth like a missile, killing the 123 passengers and nine crew aboard on Monday.

This horrific disaster, the worst in recent Chinese aviation history, highlights that the kind of data that once took investigators at least days to gather is now instantly available from open source tracking sites like FlightRadar. As a result, speculation about the cause of a crash creates an instant Twitter storm as pilots and technical experts attempt to interpret what they are looking at.

Boeing 737 Was Plunging at 350MPH in Moments Before Crash
STRAIGHT DOWN
Philippe Naughton


In this case, there is a striking consensus that something very unusual happened that cannot directly relate to previous disasters involving this version of the 737, one of the most flown jets in the world, which preceded the 737-MAX version that was grounded for nearly two years after two catastrophic accidents.

The flight pattern revealed by radar shows that the airplane was flying at 29,100 feet over mountainous terrain, with the crew about to prepare for the descent, when the nose abruptly pitched down and it began the dive. As it neared the terrain it seemed to briefly pull up but then resumed the dive to impact with enormous force.

The only certain details are what did not happen: there was no indication of an engine fire and no sign of any major part of the airplane breaking up. Significantly, there was no time for the crew to send a Mayday distress call.

There have been several cases of various models of the 737 suffering an explosive decompression, when part of the fuselage structure, weakened by undetected cracks in the outer skin, suddenly rips open and the air in the pressurized cabin is released in a blast, but even with that damage pilots have been able to get the airplane down safely, even with parts of the cabin open to the skies.

But those events happened early in the flights, when the airplanes were reaching cruise altitude, not as in this case at the end of the cruise and at the beginning of the approach to the airport.

One aerospace engineer, commenting on the Aviation Herald site, says, “It is not normal for a plane to nose dive into the ground, it rules out a lot of failures.” Another says, “To those who can’t think of any reason… there are a lot. Some repeats from things that already happened, perhaps something that has never happened before. Aviation is like that.”

The Machiavellian Reason China Is Squeezing Boeing
Clive Irving


There was a case where a similar dive was involved: in 1997 Silk Air Flight 185, when an earlier model 737 crashed into a river in Sumatra, killing 104 people, where an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the pilot had deliberately triggered the dive in an act of suicide, but this verdict was disputed by Indonesian regulators, who cited problems with the rudder controls that had caused other crashes of that model.

Another possibility is that although no break-up was visible on the radar track some part of the horizontal stabilizer, which would be activated to begin descent, may have broken off.

All of this leads to one urgent task—to find an answer in the one place where it should be found, in the airplane’s black boxes. The crash site is accessible and teams are headed there. There is, however, some concern that these flight data recorders might not survive such a devastating impact.

The Chinese regulators and investigators are highly regarded. China was the first country to ground the 737-Max and the last to allow it to return to the skies. Domestic air travel in China has grown rapidly in the last decade but there have been very few accidents.

Before Guangxi crash, 22 accidents involved Boeing 737-800 in history, 10 fatal

Before the plane crash in China's Guangxi on Monday, the Boeing 737-800 model was involved in 22 accidents, according to Aviation Safety Network (ASN).

Ten among those incidents were fatal, per the ASN database, with the first fatal crash on the record happening in September 2006 when an 18-day-old 737-800 collided mid-air in Brazil, killing 154 people.

The most recent case happened in August 2020 when an Air India Express flight slid off the runway in Kozhikode-Calicut Airport in India, killing 21 people.

At about 2:38 p.m. on Monday, a China Eastern Airlines passenger jetliner with 132 people on board crashed into a mountainous area in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Graphic by CGTN's Liu Shaozhen


The plane was flying from the southwestern city of Kunming to south China's Guangzhou when it lost contact over the city of Wuzhou, the Civil Aviation Administration of China confirmed.

The number of casualties remains unknown as of 11:30 p.m. Beijing time. Company officials said the carrier has grounded all Boeing 737-800 aircraft after the crash.

Here is a list of all the accidents involving the model:

Graphic by CGTN's Zhu Shangfan

The Boeing 737-800 NG is widely used around the world.

A Delta Air Lines Boeing 737-800 NG commercial flight lands at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2020.Credit...Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

By Niraj Chokshi
March 21, 2022, 

The Boeing 737-800 NG, the model that crashed in China on Monday, is a workhorse of the skies.

There are nearly 25,000 passenger planes in service worldwide, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider. Of those, about 4,200, or 17 percent, are Boeing 737-800 NGs. China is home to nearly 1,200 of those planes, followed by Europe, with nearly 1,000, and the United States, with nearly 800.

American Airlines has 265 737-800 NGs in service, while Southwest Airlines has 205, United Airlines has 136 and Delta Air Lines has 77, according to Cirium. Boeing delivered nearly 5,000 of the planes to customers between 1998 and 2020, according to Boeing data.

China is the largest market for Boeing planes after the United States. Last year, Boeing forecast that the number of commercial planes in China would double by 2040, with Chinese airlines needing 8,700 new aircraft by then, valued at about $1.47 trillion.

The country is perhaps more crucial for Boeing’s leading rival, Airbus. Last year, Airbus delivered 142 commercial aircraft to China, its largest single-country market, representing a quarter of Airbus’s global commercial aircraft production.

Airbus has a mammoth assembly line in the city of Tianjin, producing the A320 single-aisle planes and A330 wide-body passenger jets. It also has relationships with Chinese airline and helicopter operators, and many components in Airbus jets are made by Chinese companies. The value of the Airbus and Chinese cooperation reached around $500 million in 2015.

Liz Alderman contributed reporting.
Niraj Chokshi covers the business of transportation, with a focus on autonomous vehicles, airlines and logistics. @nirajc

China Plane Crash

China sends emergency teams, top official to oversee first full day of rescue.

The China Eastern plane descended more than 20,000 feet in just over a minute.

A deafening boom, a plume of smoke: Farmers describe a plane plunging from the sky.

Shares of Boeing are lower after the China Eastern plane crash.

China’s recent air safety record is strong, after a troubled past.

China Eastern is the nation’s second-biggest carrier.

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