A Boeing 737-800 from China Eastern who made the journey between chinese cities from Kunming (southwest) and Guangzhou (southeast) crashed today with 132 people on board, state television CCTV reported.
Flight MU5735, which had taken off at 1:15 p.m. local time (5:15 GMT), crashed to the ground in the Guangxi region (south) without further details being known or if there are any survivors at the moment.
Rescue teams headed to the scene. to try to find survivorsadd state string chinaaccording to which the accident caused a forest fire in the Teng county of the city of Wuzhou, in Guangxi.
The flight had an expected duration of one hour and forty minutes, in which the device, almost seven years old, had to travel the 1,357 kilometers that separate Kunming from Canton.
According to data from the FlightRadar24 flight tracking portal, the aircraft was flying at 2:19 p.m. local time (06:19 GMT) at an altitude of 29,100 feet (8,870 meters) when, regarding 55 kilometers west of the town of Wuzhou, it began to descend.
The last point of contact of the flight, according to the aforementioned portal, was regarding 25 kilometers southwest of Wuzhou, at an altitude of 3,225 feet (989 meters), at 2:22 p.m. local time (06:22 GMT), which would mean that in just three minutes the apparatus descended almost 8,000 meters.
Plane “completely destroyed”
A resident of the area told a local news website that the plane involved in the crash had been “completely destroyed” and that he had seen nearby forest areas destroyed by fire caused by the plane crashing into the mountainside. .
Fears were raised on Monday followingnoon when local media reported that flight MU5735 from China Eastern had not arrived as scheduled in Guangzhou following taking off from Kunming shortly following 1:00 p.m. (05:00 GMT).
The airline China Eastern, consulted by the AFP news agency, has not yet issued any comment on the matter, although on Monday followingnoon, it had changed the colors of its website to black and white.
In recent years, China has maintained good aviation security standards, in a country full of newly built airports and covered by new airlines established to meet the rapid growth of the country in recent decades.
The last big plane crash in China It was in August 2010, with an unconfirmed balance of 42 victims. It was the latest accident involving a Chinese commercial passenger flight to cause civilian casualties. The deadliest Chinese commercial flight accident was a China Northwest Airlines in 1994 in which all 160 people on board died.
Most of the passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared in March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, were from China. (With information from EFE and AFP)
Chinese president “shocked”
the president of China, Xi Jinpingsaid “shocked” following the accident of a plane with 132 people on board this Monday in the south of the country, reported public television CCTV.
Xi called for an investigation so that “the causes of the accident can be determined as soon as possible,” the channel said.
The company’s Boeing 737 China Eastern Airlines He was flying from the city of Kunming to the metropolis of Guangzhou, but “lost contact when he was flying over the city of Wuzhou”, in the mountainous region of Guangxi, according to a statement from the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC). (With information from EFE and AFP)
