China grounds planes after worst air disaster in nearly a decade
A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board crashed in a remote mountainous area of southern China on Monday, officials said, setting off a forest fire visible from space in the country’s worst air disaster in nearly a decade.
Flight data of the China Eastern Airlines passenger jet has revealed the final minutes of the ill-fated airliner. In two minutes and 15 seconds, the plane dropped from an altitude of 8870m to 2766m, according to flight-tracking website FlightRadar24. The last reported altitude for the plane was 983m.
Witness video shows the plane in a near-vertical dive towards a mountainside seconds before it crashed.
The plane was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members and there were no reported survivors.
The director of aviation consultancy firm Cirium said the Boeing 737 jet was one of the safest planes ever made and struggled to explain how the incident happened. “The 737 NG has been in operation for 25 years and has an excellent safety record,” he told Bloomberg.
“I’m not going to speculate on what happened but if the FlightRadar24 logs are accurate, something seems to have happened abruptly and the plane nose dived from cruising altitude.”
The Civil Aviation Administration of China said the crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region. The flight was travelling from Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan to Guangzhou along the east coast.
Local villagers were first to arrive at the forested area where the plane went down. Hundreds of rescue workers were swiftly dispatched from Guangxi and Guangdong province. Chinese President Xi Jinping called for an investigation.
State media reported all 737-800s in China Eastern’s fleet were ordered grounded. Aviation experts said it is unusual to ground an entire fleet of planes unless there is evidence of a problem with the model.
Boeing 737-800s have been flying since 1998, and Boeing has sold more than 5100 of them. They have been involved in 22 accidents that destroyed the planes and killed 612 people, according to data compiled by the Aviation Safety Network, an arm of the Flight Safety Foundation. “There are thousands of them around the world. It’s certainly had an excellent safety record,” the foundation’s president, Hassan Shahidi, said of the 737-800.
China’s air-safety record has improved since the 1990s as air travel has grown dramatically with the rise of a burgeoning middle class.
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. All 44 people on board were killed. Investigators blamed pilot error.
Air New Zealand no longer uses Boeing 737s for its domestic routes, opting in 2015 for an Airbus A320 fleet. Qantas uses some 737-800s for transtasman flights.