A China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft carrying 132 people crashed on Monday into the mountains of the southern province of Guangxi, according to China's air travel authority.In its statement, the Civil Aviation.
Administration of China stated that the flight carrying 123 passengers and 9 crew members had lost contact over the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi. "The plane has now been validated to have actually crashed," the agency said.China Eastern Airlines confirmed the crash and stated it was opening a hotline for the member of the family of those on board. The airline's Weibo account logo design was turned black and white in a sign of grieving.
Videos published by the official People's Daily showed thick smoke above a forest and a charred clearing, with pieces of the airplane spread on ground. A villager informed state media that at about 2:40 p.m. he heard a "big surge" and immediately rushed to the scene by motorbike. After driving for 3 or 4 minutes around the area of the crash, he did not see any victims or their remains.
State broadcaster CCTV stated the variety of casualties was still unknown.
The plane, flight MU5735, was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou and was implied to get here around 3 p.m.Hundreds of firefighters and search and rescue teams have been sent to the scene, according to local officials. Beijing Youth Daily, citing an authorities in Tengxian, a county of Wuzhou, stated groups from surrounding areas had been dispatched. "Basically we have sent all the forces that we can send out," the official said, according to the paper.
If all passengers on board are validated dead, the crash will be China's deadliest since 1994 when a China Northwest Airlines flight-- a Soviet-built Tupolev-154-- crashed in Xian, killing 160 people after the plane broke up in the air because of an auto-pilot breakdown.In 1992, a China Southern flight flying between Guangzhou and Guilin crashed while landing, eliminating all 144 travelers on board.
The nation's last significant airplane crash remained in 2010, when a Henan Airlines' ERJ-190 local jet, built by Embraer, overshot the runway on landing in Yichun in Heilongjiang province, and burst into flames, eliminating 44. The pilot was sentenced to 3 years in jail on charges of carelessness.
China's aviation safety record is amongst the best worldwide after regulators reformed the market following a string of plane crashes and hijackings in the 1990s, which earned the nation a credibility of being among the most unsafe places in the world to fly.The aircraft in Monday's crash was a Boeing 737-800 model, one of the most common passenger aircrafts in the world and practically seven years old, according to FlightAware.It was not the 737 Max series, which was grounded after being linked in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019 and just recently returned to service in China.