Air tragedy in China after a decade of aviation safety
- The last airline crash in the country was in 2010 when 44 people died in Jilin province
- The industry went through profound changes after two flights came down within in a month in 2002
In all, 132 people were on board the China Eastern Airlines’ Boeing 737-800 airliner that went down near Wuzhou in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
The crash was a shock not only in terms of the potential fatalities but also because such incidents have been rare in the last two decades.
Chinese civil aviation has generally had a good safety record in that time thanks to some of the world’s biggest investments in safety, strictest protocols and newest planes.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China said that by February 19, passenger airlines in China had operated without a major accident for 100 million hours over 137 months – a world record.
Before Monday, the most recent fatal accident was on August 24, 2010, when a Henan Airlines flight from Harbin crashed while approaching the airport in Yichun, Jilin province.
The Brazilian made ERJ-190 plane touched down in low visibility several hundred metres short of the runway, breaking in two and killing 44 of the 96 people on board.
The last major crash before the Yichun incident was 2,102 days earlier when another China Eastern Airlines flight from Baotou crashed just seconds after take-off.
The Bombardier CRJ-200 plane came down in a lake near the airport and exploded, killing all 53 on board as well as two people on the ground.
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But crashes with mass casualties were frequent throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Over Guangxi alone, there were two major crashes – in 1982, a China Southern Airlines flight came down in Gongcheng county, killing 112 on board and in 1992 another China Southern Airlines flight crashed in Yangshuo county, killing 141.
The tipping point was 2002, when two Chinese flights crashed within a month of each other – one over South Korea on April 15 and the other over Dalian on May 7.
The combined death toll from those crashes was 234, a loss of life that shocked the country and ushered in much stricter safety rules.
Chinese airliner forced to land after cockpit window falls out
Even when planes landed safely during those years, there were many potential accidents.
On March 7, 2008, a woman was stopped trying to ignite a can of petrol in an apparent attempt at a suicide attack on China Southern Airlines flight from Urumqi to Beijing.
The plane made an emergency landing in Lanzhou.
About four years later, crew and passengers of a Tianjin Airlines flight from Hotan to Urumqi prevented a hijack attempt by a group of six people armed with sharp crutches.
Two hijackers died and two were wounded, while 11 passengers and crew members also sustained injuries.
But the plane returned to Hotan safely. Both incidents were attributed to terrorists.
No lives were lost on May 14, 2018 when a windscreen failed on a Sichuan Airlines flight from Chongqing to Lhasa. The Airbus A319-100’s cockpit windscreen fell off and the first officer was partially sucked out of the opening, but the captain managed to make an emergency landing with 128 occupants unharmed.
