A black box from the Boeing 737-800 that crashed on Monday in China with 132 people on board was located, an official from the civil aviation administration announced on Wednesday. The causes of the accident are not yet known, but it is hoped that the black boxes can help clarify what happened.
A black box of [vuelo] of China Eastern MU5735 was found on March 23,” Liu Lusong, a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), told reporters.
The Boeing 737-800 is equipped with two black boxes: one in the rear of the passenger cabin, which records flight data, and one in the cockpit, which has a built-in recorder (dictator).
“At the moment, we do not know if it is the [aparato] that records data or from the cockpit recorder,” said Mao Yanfeng, a CAAC official, quoted by state media. The box found today is seriously damaged, said workers from the rescue groups quoted by the official Xinhua agency.
The flight had taken off from Kunming (southwest) in the direction of Canton but, halfway through, it lost more than 8,000 meters in height in just three minutes and crashed in the Guangxi region.
Officials have so far refrained from declaring all passengers dead, while the airline has acknowledged that people on board the flight were killed but has provided no further details. Despite the more than 2,000 people on the ground collaborating in the tasks, “the place where the plane crashed is a mountainous forest area that complicates any search,” explained an expert quoted by Xinhua.
The weather conditions have also affected the rescue work: on Wednesday morning, the rain in the area caused the temporary suspension of the work and state television even reported the risk of small landslides in the area as a result of the rainfall.
In any case, the passage of time and the violence of the plane’s impact – a local described to Xinhua having seen a “big hole” at the impact site, around which there were “downed trees within a radius of 12 meters” – make Hopes of finding survivors are fading.
According to the specialized flight tracker FlightRadar24, the aircraft lost almost 6,477 meters in one minute.
Then, following a brief ascent, it plummeted once more, at 1,410m, according to the tracker, to 983m above the ground. At 14:22 local time on Monday, the flight data was lost.
