China Eastern plane crash: human remains and a black box found at site where flight MU5735 went down
- Exterior of what is believed to be the cockpit voice recorder is ‘severely damaged’ and being sent to Beijing for analysis
- It may offer clues as to what happened before the aircraft plummeted and crashed into a hillside on Monday
The Guangxi regional fire and rescue service said human remains and aircraft wreckage had been spotted after they searched an area of 46,000 square metres (500,000 square feet).
The black box – believed to be the cockpit voice recorder – was being sent to Beijing for analysis, investigators said late on Wednesday.
“Initial inspection shows the exterior of the recorder is severely damaged. The memory unit also sustained damage, but has remained intact,” said Zhu Tao, head of aviation safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).
“The black box is now being sent to a civil aviation institute in Beijing for decoding. It will take some time to download and analyse the data. If the internal memory unit is damaged, it will take longer,” he said, adding that it would provide important information about the cause of the crash.
Zhu said the device had been spotted on the ground 20 metres southeast of the main crash site. He said the next step would be to look for the flight data recorder – the other black box – to piece together a full picture of what happened.