The airline has honored the “dead” of the disaster, although the authorities have not reported victims or reasons for the accident. Among the passengers were two citizens with a Spanish passport
Tragedy strikes the Asian giant. A China Eastern airline plane, with 132 people on board, suffered an accident on Monday with a brutal fall of about 8,000 meters, which could be the deadliest air accident in this country since 1994, in which 160 passengers died. The airline paid “tribute” to the “dead” of the disaster in a statement, although at the moment the authorities have not reported victims of the event, but everything indicates that it is unlikely that anyone was left alive.
Flight MU5735 had taken off at 1:10 p.m. (local time) from the southern city of Kunming and should have landed at 2:52 p.m. in Guangzhou, but halfway there the aircraft suffered a mishap that has yet to be clarified and fell inside Guangxi province, near Wuzhou, where it caused a forest fire. The local authorities did not offer indications about the reasons for the accident. Through an official statement, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) confirmed that 123 passengers and nine crew members were on board. Among the travelers there would be two Spanish citizens and another of Canadian nationality, they reported.
An investigation team has traveled to the scene to determine the cause of the accident. There are also about twenty fire trucks and about 600 workers participating in the rescue and fire extinction work. In fact, given the complicated orography of the area, they had to cover the last section on foot until they reached the scene of the disaster.
Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered increased search efforts and was “shocked” by what happened. In this way, he emphasized the need for rapid measures to be taken to determine the causes of the accident, as well as to strengthen security in the civil aviation sector to ensure that the lives of passengers are protected. For his part, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called for efforts to be made to support the families of the victims and demanded that accurate information be published to keep those close to those affected informed.
The Boeing 737 “lost contact while flying over the city of Wuzhou,” according to a statement from the Civil Aviation Administration of China. “At this time, it is confirmed that the flight has crashed,” the entity said. It is noteworthy that the FlightRadar24 flight tracker shows how the plane fell sharply from an altitude of 8,000 meters to 1,000 in three minutes.
Images taken at the scene circulated on Chinese social networks. In several videos, a devastated area could be seen between a hill full of vegetation, taken by the flames and a dense smoke. Images in adjoining areas show remains of the fuselage. Security cameras at a nearby mine captured what appears to be a large fragment of the plane falling vertically.
out of circulation
The accident aircraft was a Boeing 737-800. A later version of this, the Boeing 737-MAX, was temporarily withdrawn from circulation between March 2019 and December 2020 after 346 people died in two accidents: one in Indonesia in October 2018 and another in March 2019 in Ethiopia. Due to the disaster, all China Eastern Airlines flights operated with a Boeing 737-800 have been halted until further notice.
The last air accident in China dates back to 2010, when a plane crashed over Yichun, in the northern province of Heilongjiang, an incident that killed 44 of the 96 passengers.
From the United States, Boeing, manufacturer of the device, indicated that it was trying to “gather more information” about it. Meanwhile, its shares on Wall Street suffered a bump. After the incident, they fell 5.6%, quoted at 182.06 dollars at mid-day, in the biggest drop of the Dow Jones component companies.
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