WUZHOU, China
A black box from the crashed China Eastern airliner was recovered on Wednesday as investigators try to piece together what made a jet carrying 132 passengers nosedive into a mountainside in southern China.
The cause of the disaster has
mystified aviation authorities who have scoured rugged terrain for clues,
finding no survivors from what is almost certain to be China’s deadliest plane
crash in nearly 30 years.
A flight recorder “from China
Eastern MU5735 was found,” on Wednesday Liu Lusong, a spokesman for China’s
aviation authority, told reporters, although state media later said it was
badly damaged.
The Boeing 737-800 is equipped
with two flight recorders: one in the rear passenger cabin tracking flight
data, and the other a cockpit voice recorder.
“At present, it is unclear
whether it is a data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder,” that has been
found, Mao Yanfeng, an official at the Civil Aviation Administration of China
(CAAC), said according to state media.
Officials have still refrained
from declaring all of the passengers dead despite the pulverised mass of
twisted metal and charred belongings that has greeted recovery teams on the
mountainside.
On Wednesday afternoon AFP
reporters saw a small crowd of people guided by officials across the police
cordon that marks entry to the site, huddled under umbrellas in the driving
rain.
One middle-aged man later
confirmed that he was the relative of someone on the fight, and asked the media
not to crowd around him.
The Boeing 737-800 plane went down
near Wuzhou in southern China on Monday afternoon after losing contact with air
traffic control.
Flight tracking website
FlightRadar24 showed the jet sharply dropped from an altitude of 29,100 to
7,850 feet (about 8,900 to 2,400 meters) in just over a minute.
After a brief upswing, it
dropped again to 3,225 feet, the tracker said.
On Wednesday, rescuers were
forced to pause the search as rains raised risks to teams working in a zone
where a large pit has been bored out by the impact of the aircraft.
A reporter for state
broadcaster CCTV given access to the crash area said there were risks of
“small-scale landslides” as rain had destabilized the steep slopes.
President Xi Jinping was swift
to order a probe into the crash, dispatching senior Communist Party officials
to the scene, including close aide Vice Premier Liu He.
The Civil Aviation
Administration of China has said it will conduct a two-week safety inspection
across the industry.
Authorities have sealed off
access to the crash site and blocked foreign media from speaking to the
distraught relatives who have gathered in Wuzhou.
China Eastern said the crashed
plane, which was nearly seven years old, had met all airworthiness requirements
pre-flight.
Aviation authorities said more
painstaking evidence gathering was needed before coming to any conclusions.
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