China jetliner crash: 2nd black box found
BEIJING: China on Sunday mourned the victims of the China Eastern Airlines jetliner crash, hours after the country’s civil aviation authorities officially confirmed the deaths of the 132 people including nine crew members on board the aircraft.
A memorial event was held on Sunday at the site in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region where the Boeing 737-800 aircraft crashed after rapidly falling from cruising altitude on March 21.
The aircraft was enroute from the southwestern city of Kunming to Guangzhou in southern China.
At about 2pm local time on Sunday, sirens were sounded throughout a mountainous area in Tengxian county in Guangxi and staff members at the accident’s national emergency response headquarters and rescuers at the site stood solemnly in silence for three minutes in a tribute to the victims, state media reported
Recovery workers, meanwhile, have found the second black box - the flight data recorder - from the aircraft wreckage. “The second black box from China Eastern flight MU5735 was recovered on March 27,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday.
The other black box - the cockpit voice recorder - was found on Wednesday, and was sent to Beijing for examination by experts.
The two recorders should help investigators determine the cause of the crash, especially why the aircraft plummeted from 29,000 feet, and plunged into a forested mountainside in Guangxi.
Video posted by CGTN, the international arm of CCTV, showed an official holding the orange can-like object on site with the words “Recorder” and “Do Not Open” written on it.
In a late development on Saturday, the Civil Aviation of China of China (CAAC) had confirmed the deaths of all 132 passengers and crew on the plane.
Speaking to reporters on Saturday night, Hu Zhenjiang, CAAC deputy director confirmed that there were no signs of life from the crash site and that all 123 passengers and 9 crew members had been killed, state media said.
“It is with great sadness that we here announce that the 123 passengers and nine crew members on board China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735 on March 21 have all died,” Hu said at a late night press conference.
No trace of explosives in jet crash samples
China said it hasn’t found any evidence of explosive materials in the wreckage of a China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed with 132 people on board.
“Lab tests taken of 66 samples, 41 of which have been completed, showed no major common inorganic explosive or common organic explosive substances have been found,” fire official Zheng Xi said at a briefing in the southern city of Wuzhou on Saturday.