China plane crash was a sick murder-suicide
BEIJING: A pilot or an intruder in the cockpit deliberately forced a China Eastern airliner into a dive, causing the crash in March that killed all 132 people aboard, according to American officials.
Data from the flight recorder recovered from the Boeing 737 showed that human inputs to the controls forced it to plummet into a mountainside near the city of Wuzhou, according to members of the US side of the investigation. The two “black box” recorders from the aircraft, which were both damaged, were sent by China to
Washington for US experts to recover the data.
The American account, reported by The Wall Street Journal, follows weeks of secrecy from Chinese officials and appears to confirm the leading theory of experts. This holds that only human action such as murder-suicide by a pilot or intruder could explain the near vertical trajectory of the aircraft.
“The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” a person familiar with the initial assessment by experts on the US National Transportation Safety Board told the Journal. Attention has focused on a pilot, although it remains possible that another person entered the flight deck and took over the controls.
Pilots have deliberately taken their airline passengers to their doom on four occasions in recent decades. In the most recent case, in March 2015, Andreas Lubitz, a young co-pilot with a history of depression, locked the captain of his Germanwings Airbus out of the cockpit and crashed it into the French Alps. All 150 on board were killed.
China Eastern Flight 5735 from Kunming to Guangzhou was at the end of its cruise at an altitude of 29,000ft when it pitched down and lost more than 21,000ft in just over 60 seconds. It then appeared to regain altitude briefly before diving again – possibly as a result of a failed struggle for control of the plane.
The crew made no radio calls and no emergency code was transmitted from the radar transponder.
Pilots signal emergencies or hijacking by “squawking” special radar codes.
The Chinese authorities, who are leading the investigation, have not reported any mechanical or flight-control problems on the Boeing 737-800 and they cleared all aircraft of the type back into the air after grounding them for four weeks after the crash.