Black Box data suggests Chinese plane crash 'intentional': Reports

A China Eastern Airline Boeing 737-800 jet had plunged into the mountains of Guangxi, from a cruising altitude, killing all 123 passengers and nine crew members aboard in March this year. However, several media reports cite that the crash could've been 'intentional', adding that the Black Box data suggests so.

New Delhi: Flight data from the Black Box of the crashed China Eastern Airlines jet points that the crash could've been 'intentional', several media reports state. A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board had nosedived into the southern province of Guangxi in March this year. The Civil Aviation Administration of China in a statement had said the crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in Teng county. The flight was travelling from Kunming in the western province of Yunnan to the industrial centre of Guangzhou along the east coast, it added.

China Eastern's flight No. 5735 had been travelling at around 30,000 feet when suddenly, just after 2:20 pm, the plane entered a deep dive at its cruising altitude speed of 455 knots (523 mph, 842 kph), as per data from the flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.com. The plane stopped transmitting data just southwest of the Chinese city of Wuzhou. The aircraft was delivered to China Eastern from Boeing in June 2015 and had been flying for more than six years. China Eastern Airlines uses the Boeing 737-800 as one of the main workhorses of its fleet — of its over 600 planes, 109 are Boeing 737-800s.

The twin-engine, single-aisle Boeing 737 is one of the world’s most popular planes for short and medium-haul flights. China Eastern operates multiple versions of the common aircraft, including the 737-800 and the 737 Max. The deadliest crash involving a Boeing 737-800 came in January 2020, when Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard accidentally shot down a Ukraine International Airlines flight, killing all 176 people on board.