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No survivors in China crash amid grim black box search
Flight MU5735, travelling from Kunming in southwest China to Guangzhou, crashed on Monday in the Guangxi region — the first passenger jetliner crash in the country since 2010.
A day after a China Eastern Airlines flight with 132 people on board crashed into a remote mountainside in south China, hopes of finding any survivors have faded.
“No survivors of the MU5735 have been found as of 9 pm Tuesday, 30 hours after the accident,” an investigation team from the State Council, or China’s cabinet, announced late on Tuesday evening.
Flight MU5735, travelling from Kunming in southwest China to Guangzhou, crashed on Monday in the Guangxi region — the first passenger jetliner crash in the country since 2010.
Questions have mounted over the cause of the crash, which saw the stricken jet drop 20,000 feet in just over a minute before plunging into rugged terrain.
Emergency workers found wreckage from the Boeing 737-800 aircraft strewn across mountain slopes charred by fire after the crash. They continued to comb the heavily forested areas of Guangxi for survivors until late on Tuesday.
The so-called black box recorders haven’t been recovered, state-backed news agency Xinhua reported.
“The jet was seriously damaged during the crash, and investigations will face a very high level of difficulty,” Zhu Tao, director of aviation safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said at a briefing on the disaster, Reuters reported.
He said the focus is now on “the search for flight recorders”.
Two senior Communist Party of China (CPC) leaders — Liu He, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council, and State Councilor Wang Yong — were at the site to coordinate search and rescue operations and direct investigations into the accident, Chinese state media reported.
Beijing has yet to confirm the casualty figures.
Chinese state media reported that there is little chance of survival for those aboard. “...The situation appears grim, and the possibility of all on board perishing cannot be ruled out,” Wang Yanan, chief editor of Beijing-based Aerospace Knowledge, told the tabloid Global Times.
With inputs from Agencies
