Chris Lange, FISM News
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Aviation experts remain baffled by a plane crash in China believed to have killed all 132 passengers, while they search for answers amongst the rubble in in the southern region of Guangxi.
Video footage captured the dramatic moment the Eastern Airlines’ Boeing 737-800 took a sudden nosedive while at a cruising altitude, plunging into a mountainous area. The flight had been heading from Kunming to Guangzhou’s International Airport in China and was only 100 miles away from its destination at the time of the crash. Search and rescue operations continue, but a Chinese state broadcaster said no survivors were found at the crash site. Chinese authorities said no foreigners were on the domestic flight.
Flight records revealed that the jetliner’s nose suddenly pointed toward the ground, plunging 29,000 feet in the span of just 95 seconds, according to Flightradar24. Though rare, the incident is not the first time an airliner has crashed from a cruising altitude. Still, the plane’s extreme lurch downward has puzzled veteran crash investigators, particularly in light of the 737-800’s excellent safety record.
“It’s an odd profile,” aviation safety consultant and former 737 pilot John Cox told Bloomberg News. “It’s hard to get the airplane to do this.”
Former National Transportation Safety Board investigator Benjamin Berman said the 737-800 is specifically designed to avoid such steep dives, according to the news agency, suggesting the crash may have resulted from an extremely unusual malfunction or a deliberate effort by the pilot.
“You need something to hold the nose down,” Berman said.
“The first thing accident investigators are going to have to determine is: was the aircraft all in one piece when it hit the ground, or did something fall off the airplane before it hit the ground?” Juan Browne, a Boeing 777 pilot, was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post. “The video data to me suggests that the aircraft was in one piece,” he added.
Though highly unusual, a similar incident occurred in 2019 when an Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings cargo plane took a sudden nosedive, crashing into Trinity Bay near Houston and killing all three on board. Investigators concluded that the pilot had become disoriented and inadvertently pointed the plane’s nose down, according to a 2020 report by the National Transportation Safety Board.
While search and rescue teams do not expect to find any survivors at the site, they continue to sift through debris with the help of drones, metal detectors, and sniffer dogs in the heavily-forested area. Some passengers’ personal items have been discovered, including wallets and identity cards. Searchers have also found human remains.
One of the jetliner’s two black box recorders was recovered Wednesday. The cockpit voice recorder’s outer casing was damaged but the device appeared to be fairly intact overall, according to the Associated Press. The black box will be key in determining what happened in the seconds leading up to the crash.
China Eastern, one of China’s four major airlines, said the jetliner that crashed was in good condition and that the flight crew was experienced and healthy.