Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
No survivors are found after Chinese jet crashes, explodes
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. 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, 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.
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.”
Chen Weihao, who saw the falling plane while working on a farm, told the Xinhua news agency the “plane looked to be in one piece when it nosedived. Within seconds, it crashed.”
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 on China’s southeastern coast.
No foreigners were on board the lost flight, the Foreign Ministry said, citing a preliminary review.