One ‘black box’ found in China Eastern plane crash

WUZHOU, March 23: A Chinese aviation official said Wednesday that one of the two “black box” recorders had been found in severely damaged condition, two days after a China Eastern flight crashed in southern China with 132 people on board.

The device is so damaged that investigators were not able to tell whether it is the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder, said Mao Yanfeng, the director of the accident investigation division of the Civil Aviation Authority of China.

He told a news conference that an all-out effort is being made to find the other black box.

Recovering the so-called black boxes — they are usually painted orange for visibility — is considered key to figuring out what caused the crash. It wasn’t clear if the damage to the recovered one would limit its usefulness.

The search for clues into why a Chinese commercial jetliner dove suddenly and crashed into a mountain in southern China had been suspended earlier Wednesday as rain slickened the debris field and filled the red-dirt gash formed by the plane’s fiery impact.

An air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply, but got no reply, a grim-faced Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said at a Tuesday evening news conference.

“As of now, the rescue has yet to find survivors,” Zhu said. “The public security department has taken control of the site.”

China Eastern is headquartered in Shanghai and is one of China’s three largest carriers with more than 600 planes, including 109 Boeing 737-800s. China’s Transport Ministry said China Eastern has grounded all of its 737-800s, a move that could further disrupt domestic air travel already curtailed because of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in China since the initial peak in early 2020.

The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has a well-established safety record. It is an earlier model than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.

Monday’s crash was China’s worst in more than a decade. In August 2010, an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun and caught fire. It carried 96 people and 44 of them died. Investigators blamed pilot error.