China Eastern plane crash: One of the two black boxes discovered

Pic courtesy: Reuters

Beijing: China says one of two black boxes from the China Eastern plane crash was found in severely damaged condition. The recorder is so damaged that they are not able to tell whether it is the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder. 

On March 21, a Boeing 737 plane with 132 passengers on board crashed in China's Guangxi province. China Eastern Flight 5735 was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew from Kunming in Yunnan province to Guangzhou, an industrial centre on China's southeastern coast when it crashed Monday afternoon outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region. All 132 people on board are presumed killed.

An air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane's altitude drop sharply, but got no reply, a grim-faced Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said at a Tuesday evening news conference.

China Eastern is headquartered in Shanghai and one of China's three largest carriers with more than 600 planes, including 109 Boeing 737-800s. China's Transport Ministry said China Eastern has grounded all of its 737-800s, a move that could further disrupt domestic air travel already curtailed because of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in China since the initial peak in early 2020. The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has a well-established safety record. It is an earlier model than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.

Monday's (March 21) crash was China's worst in more than a decade. In August 2010, an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun and caught fire. It carried 96 people and 44 of them died. Investigators blamed pilot error.