All 132 on board plane that crashed in China feared dead

A Chinese passenger aircraft with 132 people on board crashed in a mountainous area of southern China on Monday, likely killing all passengers and crew.

The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 flying from Kunming in southwest China to southern China’s Guangzhou city descended in freefall before crashing in the Guangxi autonomous region on Monday afternoon, igniting a forest fire, state media reports said.

It is feared that there were no survivors among the 123 passengers and nine-member crew.

China Eastern, one of China’s three major carriers, said the cause of the crash, just before which the aircraft descended at a final rate of 31,000 feet a minute according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, was under investigation.

“China Eastern Airlines has activated the emergency mechanism, dispatched a working group to the scene, and opened a special line for emergency assistance to family members,” the airline said in a social media statement.

The Communist Party of China’s mouthpiece People’s Daily quoted a provincial firefighting department official as saying there was no sign of life among the debris.

A “shocked” President Xi Jinping has ordered an investigation into the reasons behind the crash.

China’s record in civil aviation safety has been good in the last couple of decades, showing remarkable improvement since the 1990s.

The last major aircraft accident involving civilians in China was in 2010.

Monday’s ill-fated flight, MU 5735 took off from Kunming airport in Yunnan province at 1:15pm local time, and was scheduled to arrive at Guangzhou, the capital of south China’s Guangdong province at 3:07 local time.

The aircraft, however, disappeared from the radars of civil aviation authorities tracking the flight, triggering panic among the regulators.

Reports of the crash came in soon after with local villagers who witnessed the crash reporting the incident to local authorities.

The crash site was located at a village near Wuzhou City in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, according to the local emergency department.

Firefighters were among the first emergency workers to reach the spot.

By late evening, hundreds of emergency workers from different areas had fanned out around the crash site to look for survivors.

Post-crash footage taken by villagers went viral on Chinese social media.

Unverified videos showed fire and smoke from the crash site and surrounding forests while aircraft debris were shown strewn on the ground.

Xi ordered all-out search and rescue efforts and “swift action” to identify the cause of the crash, official news agency Xinhua reported.

Xi said he was “…shocked to learn about the incident involving China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735…and ordered the immediate launch of emergency response, all-out search and rescue efforts and proper settlement of the aftermath”.

The investigation will focus on whether human error or a technical snag caused the crash.

“The aircraft belonged to the Yunnan subsidiary of China Eastern Airlines and had been in operation for just over six and a half years. The aircraft was delivered in June of 2015,” the tabloid, Global Times reported.

The aircraft has a total of 162 seats, including 12 business class seats and 150 economy class seats.

Experts are surprised that mishap appeared to have happened when the aircraft was cruising.

“Usually the plane is on auto-pilot during cruise-stage. So, it is very hard to fathom what happened,” Li Xiaojin, a Chinese aviation expert told Reuters. “From a technical point of view, something like this should not have happened,” Li said.

Monday’s crash dented China’s civil aviation safety record.

“In 2020, the civil aviation industry of China performed in a stable and controllable manner in term of safe operation with the 10-year rolling value of major transport accident rate per million movements and the 10-year rolling value of death toll per 100 million passenger-km both standing at 0,” the 2020 report by Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), released last February, said.

“There were 18 general aviation accidents resulting in 13 deaths,” for 2020, the report said.