China plane crash: One damaged ‘black box’ found, details about pilots released

One of two black boxes – flight data recorders – from the China Eastern Airline plane that crashed Monday in south China’s Guangxi province has been found, an official from the country’s aviation regulator told reporters.

Details were also released about the pilots, Bloomberg News said; all three had valid licenses and health certificates and experience. Bloomberg earlier said data suggested the pilots didn’t respond to calls from air traffic controllers after the plane dived.

The captain had 6,709 hours in the model that crashed, while the first co-pilot had a total of 31,769 flying hours, officials said at a briefing. The second co-pilot had 556 hours of flying hours experience, Bloomberg reported.

Recovering the ‘black boxes’ is key to discovering why flight MU5735 plunged out of the sky at close to the speed of sound before slamming into a hillside.

It is not immediately clear which of the two boxes – flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder – was recovered. It was, however, severely damaged.

The two devices – referred to as black boxes even though they’re painted orange to make them easier to see – can store audio recordings from the cockpit and data on hundreds of flight parameters to help investigators.

State television earlier reported that work had been halted at the crash site due to bad weather; broadcasting footage showed debris and aircraft parts scattered across the muddy terrain.

“The site of the crash in a mountain forest complicates the search for the black boxes and we have to rely mainly on drones and rescue staff,” Zhu Xiaodong, a rescuer with a Guangzhou-based drone rescue centre, told state media.

Thousands of firefighters and emergency rescue officials are scouring the mountainside to search for debris, the second black box and bodies.

The plane – a Boeing 737-800 – was travelling from Kunming to Guangzhou when it went into a steep nosedive from a cruising altitude of 29,000 feet, falling to around 3,000 feet in around 155 seconds before radar contact was lost.

> At 11.50 am (India time) the plane was cruising at 29,100 feet.

> 135 seconds later it nosedived to 9,075 feet.

> 20 seconds later it was just 3,225 feet above the ground.

The plane plunged almost 26,000 feet in 95 seconds.

All 123 passengers and nine crew are presumed dead.

Investigators have offered no major insights as to why the jet crashed, saying at a press conference late Tuesday it was too early draw clear conclusions.

“It’s an odd profile,” John Cox, an aviation safety consultant and former Boeing 737 pilot, said, “It’s hard to get the airplane to do this.”

Good weather conditions

At the time of the accident, no adverse weather conditions were reported.

Call records show normal communication from take-off till the sudden drop in altitude, an official of the Civil Aviation Administration of China said.

The probe ordered by China president Xi Jinping will try to determine why the plane made such an abrupt dive, which sets it apart from earlier accidents.

Information from the recovered black box will be crucial in this regard.

Among other points, aviation experts will consider weather conditions and examine wreckage for any signs of possible malfunction.

China Eastern has grounded its Boeing 737-800 fleet and thousands of flights have been cancelled. Regulators have ordered a safety review encompassing much of the country’s aviation industry.