A Chinese passenger aircraft with 132 people on board crashed in a mountainous area of southern China on Monday, killing all passengers and crew.
The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 flying from Kunming in southwest China to southern China’s Guangzhou city descended in freefall before crashing in the Guangxi autonomous region on Monday afternoon, igniting a forest fire, state media reports said. The plane was carrying 123 passengers and nine-member crew.
China Eastern, one of China’s three major carriers, said the cause of the crash, just before which the aircraft descended at a final rate of 31,000 feet a minute according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, was under investigation.
“China Eastern Airlines has activated the emergency mechanism, dispatched a working group to the scene, and opened a special line for emergency assistance to family members,” the airline said in a social media statement.
The Communist Party of China’s mouthpiece People’s Daily quoted a provincial firefighting department official as saying there was no sign of life among the debris.
{{/usCountry}}The Communist Party of China’s mouthpiece People’s Daily quoted a provincial firefighting department official as saying there was no sign of life among the debris.
{{/usCountry}}President orders investigation
A “shocked” President Xi Jinping has ordered an investigation into the reasons behind the crash.
Xi ordered all-out search and rescue efforts and “swift action” to identify the cause of the crash, official news agency Xinhua reported.
Xi said he was “…shocked to learn about the incident involving China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735…and ordered the immediate launch of emergency response, all-out search and rescue efforts and proper settlement of the aftermath”.
The investigation will focus on whether human error or a technical snag caused the crash.
China’s record in civil aviation safety has been good in the last couple of decades, showing remarkable improvement since the 1990s.
The last major aircraft accident involving civilians in China was in 2010.
Monday’s ill-fated flight, MU5735 took off from Kunming airport in Yunnan province at 1:15pm local time, and was scheduled to arrive at Guangzhou, the capital of south China’s Guangdong province at 3:07 local time.
The aircraft, however, disappeared from the radars of civil aviation authorities tracking the flight, triggering panic among the regulators.
Reports of the crash came in soon after with local villagers who witnessed the crash reporting the incident to local authorities.
Crash site in south China’s Guangxi region
The crash site was located at a village near Wuzhou City in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, according to the local emergency department. Firefighters were among the first emergency workers to reach the spot.
By late evening, hundreds of emergency workers from different areas had fanned out around the crash site to look for survivors.
Post-crash footage taken by villagers went viral on Chinese social media.
Unverified videos showed fire and smoke from the crash site and surrounding forests while aircraft debris were shown strewn on the ground.
“The aircraft belonged to the Yunnan subsidiary of China Eastern Airlines and had been in operation for just over six and a half years. The aircraft was delivered in June of 2015,” the tabloid, Global Times reported. The aircraft had a total of 162 seats, including 12 business class and 150 economy class seats.