Plane crashes in southern China with 132 people on board

A passenger plane with 132 people aboard crashed in the mountains near the city of Wuzhou in Teng County, Guangxi Province, with no sign of survivors. The crash, which sparked a fire big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images, is the country’s worst air disaster in nearly a decade.

China Eastern Airlines flight MU-5735 left Kunming at 1:11 p.m. on March 21 and was due to land in Guangzhou at 3:05 p.m.

• The plane, a six-year-old Boeing 737-800, was traveling at 455 knots (523 mph) at a cruising altitude of 29,100 feet when it made a sudden descent, losing more than 21,000 feet in just over a minute. It appeared to briefly regain altitude around 8,000 feet before continuing its plunge, per Flightradar24’s data.
• A nearby surveillance camera caught footage of what appeared to be a plane plunging directly toward Earth, according to a manager at Wuzhou City Beichen Mining.
• Local villagers were first to arrive at the forested area where the plane went down, followed by hundreds of rescue workers dispatched from Guangxi and Guangdong.
• China Eastern said the cause of the crash was under investigation, though weather reports don’t suggest any possible contributing factors, per the New York Times. Weather and rough terrain could hamper rescue efforts overnight.

China holds a strong record in aviation safety, with no fatal commercial aircraft crashes in recent years and millions of flights operating without incident. The tragedy comes as the nation is set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest aviation market by the middle of the decade, with domestic traffic bouncing back toward pre-pandemic levels last year.

• The last fatal crash of a Chinese airliner occurred in August 2010, when a Henan Airlines Embraer ERJ 190-100 hit the ground near the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun and caught fire, ​​killing all 44 people on board. Investigators blamed pilot error, per the Associated Press.
• China Eastern’s last fatal crash was in 2004, when all 53 passengers and crew on a Bombardier aircraft died when it crashed after takeoff in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, per Bloomberg.

China Eastern has expressed “its deep condolences for the passengers and crew members who died in the plane crash” and said it would ground all of its Boeing 737-800 jets starting on Tuesday. Chinese President Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 has called for a prompt investigation into the cause of the crash.