Chinese investigators announced the discovery of one of the two black boxes from the China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed earlier this week. The equipment is “severely damaged,” so it was impossible to determine whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder.
China Eastern flight MU5735 was en route Monday from the city of Kunming to Guangzhou on the coast when the Boeing 737-800 operating the route suddenly plummeted from its cruising altitude near the point where it should have begun its descent. The aircraft totally disintegrated upon impact, and no survivors have been found.
“We found a black box at the crash site but it is severely damaged. Such is the extent of the destruction that the search team is unable to determine whether it is the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder,” Mao Yanfeng, head of the investigation at CAAC, told Reuters. Heavy rains in southern China on Wednesday hampered the search for survivors and black boxes. The bad weather is expected to last for – at least – the rest of the week.
About the flight, the official added that “weather conditions along the route posed no danger to the aircraft. Plus air traffic controllers maintained contact with the crew until the moments before the precipitation to the ground.”
In addition, Yanfeng noted that the aircraft met all airworthiness standards and that all three pilots were in good health. The captain was hired in January 2018 and had 6,709 hours of total flight experience. On the other hand, the first and second officers had 31,769 hours and 556 hours respectively. “To the best of our knowledge the performance of the three pilots was always good and their family life was relatively harmonious,” an airline spokesperson said after the accident.
Spectacular descent
An investigation by The Air Current helps put the magnitude of the fall of flight MU5735 into context by comparing decent rates with those of other accidents. It is notable that of the first four occurrences, three were intentional, either due to deliberate actions by the crew (suicide) or hijacking by terrorists.
Monday’s crash is the first significant one in China in more than a decade. The last fatal event in the Asian country was Henan Airlines Flight 8387. This occurred in August 2010, when an Embraer E190 hit trees, crashed, and caught fire 700 meters from the runway threshold at Yichun airport during an attempted landing in dense fog. Forty-four people were killed.
China’s civil aviation regulator -CAAC- is known for being absolutely inflexible with airlines and for having a total fixation with maintaining safe operations in the country. The Chinese air market is one of the safest in the world. With a rate of 0.03 occurrences per million operations in the period 2017-2021 exceeds by far Europe (0.14) and North America (0.06).
