There are no survivors among the 123 passengers and nine crew members of the plane that crashed last Monday (21) in China, the CAAC (China Civil Aviation Administration) said on Saturday (26).
The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 departed the city of Kunming bound for Guangzhou, with 132 people on board, and crashed in a mountainous area near Wuzhou. All aboard were Chinese citizens.
The confirmation of the deaths makes this plane crash the worst since 1994 in the country, where air safety is considered very good by experts.
Hundreds of firefighters, soldiers, doctors and volunteers were mobilized to search for traces of the passengers and the black boxes.
On Wednesday (23), teams recovered the aircraft’s first black box, the cockpit voice recorder. She was taken to Beijing for analysis and, although she was “severely damaged” from the outside, her memory unit appeared to be preserved and intact.
On Thursday, teams said they found engine parts, part of a wing and other “important debris” on the mountainside in Guangxi. A piece measuring 1.2 meters in length was found more than 10 kilometers from the main site of the fall, which led to the expansion of the area searched.
The aircraft fell at an almost vertical angle and lost 8 km of altitude in less than two minutes, in circumstances that puzzle experts.
CAAC said there was no reason to attribute the Boeing crash to adverse weather conditions. Meteorological records at the time of the accident indicate that there was cloudiness on the route traveled, but not to the point of impairing visibility.
