[천지일보=이솜 기자] Chinese authorities confirmed on the 26th that all passengers on the Eastern Airlines flight that crashed on the 21st with 132 people on board were dead. “On March 21st, Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735 (Boeing 737-800), 123 passengers and 9 crew members died,” said Hu Jianjiang, deputy director of the Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) of China. The identities of 120 of the victims were determined through DNA analysis.
On the 21st, while moving from the southwestern city of Kunming to the port city of Guangzhou, the aircraft crashed into a mountainous area near Teng County, Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, at an altitude of 8,800 meters. According to online tracking data, the aircraft plunged down to 2,400 meters in less than a minute. The flight controller tried to contact the pilot several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply, but there was no response, the official said.
The cause of the fall is still a labyrinth. The weather was good at the time, and the pilots did not sound the alarm. China also has one of the safest aviation records in the world.
Airline officials said they found a black box believed to be a cockpit voice recorder, but had not yet found a flight data recorder. He also said that no major compound was detected in the wreckage of the crash. It was explained that the cause of the accident was not an explosive or explosive accident.
It was the deadliest plane crash in China in 30 years. In 1994, an autopilot failure of China’s Northwest Airlines in Xi’an caused an airplane to disintegrate, killing 160 people.
After the accident, rescue teams scoured the forested slopes near Wuzhou city in Guangxi province to find the plane wreckage and traces of survivors. More than 500 relatives have visited the city and the scene of the accident to hear from the passengers.
The story of a young couple who took their newborn baby away for surgery in Guangzhou, a mining company executive, a recently married woman, and a passenger returning to Guangzhou after the Lunar New Year holidays were reported through local media, adding to the sadness.
After the disaster, Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered aviation authorities to conduct extensive inspections of Chinese airliners for two weeks.
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