Second black box of crashed China Eastern Airlines plane found: State media

This article is more than 12 months old

Mar 27, 2022 01:11 pm

Recovery crews on Sunday (March 27) found the flight data recorder at the site where a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 crashed into a mountainside in southern China, state media reported.

Flight MU5735, with 132 people onboard, was en route from the southwestern city of Kunming to Guangzhou on the coast on Monday when it plummeted from cruising altitude.

The plane lost more than 20,000 feet in altitude in just over a minute before hitting the ground in the region of Guangxi.

There had been little hope of finding any survivors. In a late night news conference on Saturday, officials announced that all the people onboard, including nine crew members, had been confirmed dead.

The cause of the crash remains unknown.

It was the deadliest air disaster in mainland China since 1994, when a China Northwest Airlines flight from Xian to Guangzhou crashed, killing all 160 people on board.

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The first of the two black boxes - the cockpit voice recorder - was found on Wednesday, and sent to Beijing for examination by experts.

The second one was dug out of a slope at the crash site around 9.20am in muddy conditions after rain in recent days, state media reported.

The device, found 1.5 metres beneath the surface of the slope, was also to be sent to Beijing for checks, according to the reports.

Aviation officials and experts have warned that both recorders could be badly damaged from the crash, which would make it more difficult to retrieve their data.

Search crews are also trying to recover debris from the plane, which could take weeks, if not longer.

In recent days, workers have recovered parts of the plane’s engines, wings and main landing gear, along with other pieces of wreckage.

Officials said they had determined the plane’s main impact point and most of the debris was concentrated within a radius of 30m. But search teams also found a 1.2m-long piece of debris, likely from the plane, more than 10km from the main crash site.

China is leading the crash investigation. The United States has also been invited to take part, as the Boeing 737-800 was designed and manufactured there.

The US National Transportation Safety Board said it was working with US and Chinese authorities to resolve visa and Covid-19 quarantine issues before participating.