China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735: air safety experts study video and flight data in search of crash clues
- The plane descended at over 9,000 metres per minute in the last few seconds before it crashed, according to data captured by Flightradar24
- It is ‘extremely rare’ for an aircraft to end up in such a near-vertical attitude, says an aviation analyst
The chilling video captured a scene rarely recorded: a commercial airliner in a near-vertical nosedive, hurtling toward the ground at hundreds of kilometres an hour.
The footage of what appeared to be flight MU5735’s final few moments was shared widely on Chinese social media on Monday, hours after the Boeing 737-800 operated by China Eastern Airlines crashed into a forested hillside in southern Guangxi province, around an hour after taking off in neighbouring Yunnan.
Rescue teams raced to the scene, but none of the 132 people on board – 123 passengers and nine crew members – are expected to have survived the crash, making it China’s deadliest air disaster in decades.
As China’s civil aviation authority began its investigation, air safety experts were studying the video footage and flight data for clues as to what could have caused the crash and what investigators will be focused on.
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Boeing 737 plane crashes in China’s southern Guangxi with 132 people on board
“The first thing accident investigators are going to have to determine is: was the aircraft all in one piece when it hit the ground, or did something fall off the aeroplane before it hit the ground?” said Juan Browne, a Boeing 777 pilot and popular aviation vlogger who analyses air incidents. “The video data to me suggests that the aircraft was in one piece.”