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March 23 (UPI) — A search for victims and flight data from China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735, which crashed Monday on a mountainside in southern China with 132 people on board, has been interrupted by heavy rain and was suspended on Wednesday, state media reported.
Scenes on state broadcaster CCTV showed the muddy conditions around the search area, where dense forest and steep slopes have made efforts at locating the aircraft’s black boxes challenging. More than 2,000 people and trained dogs have joined the search and rescue operation, officials said.
No survivors have been found and the cause for the crash is still unknown, aviation officials said at a press conference on Tuesday night.
“Based on known information, the authorities do not yet have a clear clue as to the cause of the passenger plane crash,” Zhu Tao, head of the aviation safety office of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said. “The investigation is very difficult as the aircraft was severely damaged.”
The plane, a Boeing 737-800, crashed on Monday with 123 passengers and nine crew as it was en route from Kunming to the port city of Guangzhou. No foreign nationals were on the flight, Zhu said, according to news agency Xinhua.
Flight MU5735 departed Kunming at 1:16 p.m. for a scheduled two-hour flight. The aircraft entered the Guangzhou air traffic control area at a cruising altitude of 29,000 feet at 2:17 p.m. Monday, but began a rapid plunge at 2:20 p.m. Air traffic controllers made repeated calls to the crew but received no response, Zhu said.
The plane dropped off radar at 2:23 p.m., and was found to have crashed into a heavily forested mountainside near the city of Wuzhou, setting off a fire.
The plane initially dropped over 20,000 feet in around a minute, according to tracking service Flightradar24, and briefly recovered before plunging again.
The Civil Aviation Administration ordered a two-week safety inspection of the country’s entire aviation sector, including airlines, regional air traffic control centers and flight training institutes, it announced on Tuesday night.
China Eastern Airlines, the country’s second-largest carrier, has grounded its fleet of 737-800 planes pending an investigation.
The crash is the latest involving a Boeing 737 in recent years. Two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019 and forced Boeing to ground the fleet worldwide. The planemaker ultimately found a problem with the 737 Max’s automated flight software.
Monday’s crash in China, however, involved a Boeing 737-800 model, not a Max. The 737-800, also known as the 737 NG, has a sterling safety record and is considered one of the safest planes in commercial aviation.
Before Monday, the last major crash of a 737-800 plane occurred in August 2020 when a flight slid off the runway in India and killed almost two dozen people. Investigators later blamed the crash on the pilot.
Boeing China said Tuesday that it is cooperating with China Eastern Airlines and is ready to aid the investigation.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board also announced that it had appointed a senior air safety investigator as a U.S.-accredited representative to the investigation.
China’s aviation safety record has been among the world’s best over the last decade. The country’s last major crash occurred in 2010 when an Embraer jet operated by Henan Airlines missed a runway while attempting to land in northern China and killed 44 of the 96 passengers aboard.
China Eastern’s last deadly accident occurred in 2004 when a Bombardier jet crashed into a lake shortly after takeoff in inner Mongolia. Fifty-five people died.
