The 737-800 has an excellent safety record, said Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. The flight had departed the city of Kunming in Yunnan and was headed to Guangzhou in Guangdong province. The 6 1/2-year-old plane's “technical condition was stable” and met requirements to fly, said Sun Shiying, the the chairman of the Yunnan provincial branch of China Eastern Airlines. The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds including conversations and background engine noise during the flight.Įven with the extent of the damage to the plane, investigators should be able to get a good idea of what happened if the black boxes survived and can be downloaded. One device, called the flight data recorder, captures information about the plane's airspeed, altitude, direction up or down, pilot actions, and performance of all key systems. Recovering the so-called black boxes is key to the investigation – they are usually painted orange for visibility, but the longtime name has stuck. ![]() Investigators will make an all-out effort to collect evidence, with a focus on finding the flight recorder, Tao said. “We cannot have a clear assessment of the cause of the accident with the information currently available,” Zhu said at a Tuesday night news conference, the first since the crash.Īuthorities are “carrying out in-depth investigation” of the aircraft's design and maintenance, air traffic control, weather and other issues, he said. Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said damage to the aircraft was severe, which makes the investigation “very difficult.” Investigators have declined to discuss possible reasons for the crash. Searchers must climb steep inclines as they fan out in the area, which is surrounded on three sides by mountains and accessible by a dirt road. The main crash area, now a large barren pit in the forested mountainside, is about half the size of a football field. ![]() Parts of the plane are scattered over a wide area, including the other side of the mountain, state broadcaster CCTV said. Authorities have given no indication they found survivors, bodies or the plane's “black box” flight recorders. Rescuers with sniffer dogs and drones have found wallets, identity cards and small parts of plane debris. ![]() The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 was flying at 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) on Monday afternoon when it suddenly nosedived into a gap in the mountains outside the southern Chinese city of Wuzhou.Īlso read: Wallets, IDs but no survivors found in China plane crash The search for the black boxes and any survivors - a remote possibility at best - was temporarily suspended Wednesday due to rain on the muddy, charred mountainside. Add rain to the list of challenges facing Chinese investigators trying to determine why a passenger jet with 132 people on board crashed in a remote forested region this week.
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