China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 With 132 Onboard Crashes In Southern China

(RTTNews) - Tragedy struck in China after a Boeing 737 crashed into the mountains in southern China on Monday. The China Eastern Airlines flight had 132 people on board when the catastrophic crash happened. Eyewitnesses have claimed that the Boeing 737-800 lost a lot of altitude in a really short time. The airline has not yet confirmed the cause of the crash. According to reports, the plane plummeted at the rate of 31,000 feet per minute before disintegrating into a ball of flames over a bamboo forest. The airline has opened up a hotline for the relatives of those on board, but according to the rescue officials, there has been no sign of life amidst the debris.

The plane had 123 passengers with 9 crew traveling from Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong. According to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), the flight lost all contact with the air traffic control over the city of Wuzhou. The flight took off at 1:11 PM local time and was scheduled to land at 3:05 pm.

Flightradar24, a flight tracking system, showed that the six-year-old plane started to lose altitude one hour and nine minutes after taking off and was cruising at 29,100 feet before things went south. Reports say that only 13% of the plane crashes between 2011 and 2020 have taken place during cruising.

Chinese aviation expert, Li Xiaojin said, "Usually the plane is on auto-pilot during cruise stage. So it is very hard to fathom what happened. From a technical point of view, something like this should not have happened."

A Boeing spokesperson said, "We are aware of the initial media reports and are working to gather more information."

China Eastern Airlines is sixth in the world in scheduled weekly seat capacity and is considered to be one of the most rigid airlines when it comes to safety measures.

The 737-800, a predecessor to the ill-fated Boeing 737 MAX, was also considered to be a very stable aircraft, unlike the latter which suffered fatal crashes in 2018 in Indonesia and in 2019 in Ethiopia.

The administration is trying to retrieve the black box to find out the cause of the crash. Flightglobal editor Greg Waldron said that while the safety regulation at the CAAC is strict, the lack of clarity from the aviators is also one of the reasons behind the underreporting of cases in the mainland.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, this is one of the largest plane crashes in the country since a China Northwest Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 crashed between Xian and Guangzhou with 160 fatalities in 1994.