[imagesource: Bloomberg]
Aviation experts are at a loss as to what caused a Boeing 737-800 model, carrying 132 people and flown by China Eastern Airlines, to plunge into the mountains of Teng County in southern China’s Guangxi province.
No survivors have been found.
What is so hard to understand is why the plane, travelling from Kunming to Guangzhou, was cruising normally before it plummeted 29 000 feet in an accident likely to be the country’s most deadly in more than a decade.
Chinese crash investigators said 2 500 rescuers had combed through the scene, reports Gizmodo, although as things stand they have not yet located the plane’s black box.
Investigators said they lost communications with the flight’s crew around 2:21PM.
Minoru Uchida, a former Boeing 767 captain for Japan Airlines, spoke with VICE:
“Even from a pilot’s point of view, this crash is extremely mystifying—it’s unthinkable…Even if both engines fail, the wings will keep the plane elevated,” said Uchida, who is now a professor of Aviation Technology Crisis Management at the Chiba Institute of Science…
Hiroyuki Kobayashi, an aviation safety consultant and former captain for Japan Airlines with 42 years’ experience, said the crash could have been due to a mechanical problem, extreme turbulence, or an attempted suicide.
Footage showing the moment the plane plunged from the sky has been widely shared:
This shocking video of #MU5735 crashing down was confirmed to be authentic, it was recorded by the monitoring cameras of a mining company in Teng county near Wuzhou that is located about 6 km from where the plane crashed. pic.twitter.com/IzcsFgwFfH
— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) March 21, 2022
Uchida does say that from close scrutiny of the video, there’s a chance the plane was missing a wing when it fell.
This could have happened due to a collision with another object or an onboard explosion.
Investigators told reporters the plane was in good working order prior to its departure, and that nine crew members on board were in good health and met minimum experience requirements.
The 737-800, which the New York Times notes accounts for somewhere around 17% of passenger planes in service worldwide, was notably not the same as Boeing’s 737 Max model implicated in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that left 346 people dead.
Aerospace Knowledge chief editor Wang Ya’nan suggested the crash may have been a result of a power failure, which would be a very serious technical failure.
The plane dropped from an altitude of 29 100 feet (8 870 metres) to 7 850 feet (2 393 metres) in just over a minute. There was a brief upswing before it then plunged to 3 225 feet (982 metres).
It’s hoped that once the black box is located, further light can be shed on what happened in those fateful few minutes prior to the crash.
