Chinese plane with 132 on board crashes in mountains

BEIJING: A China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board crashed in mountains in southern China on a domestic flight on Monday after a sudden descent from cruising altitude. The media said there were no signs of survivors.

The airline said it deeply mourned the loss of passengers and crew, without specifying how many people had been killed.

Chinese media showed brief highway video footage from a vehicle's dashcam apparently showing a jet diving to the ground behind trees at an angle of about 35 degrees off vertical. The British wire agency could not immediately verify the footage.

The plane was en route from the southwestern city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, bordering Hong Kong, when it crashed.

China Eastern said the cause of the crash, in which the plane descended at 31,000 feet a minute according to flight-tracking website FlightRadar24, was under investigation.

The airline said it had provided a hotline for relatives of those on board and sent a working group to the site. There were no foreigners on the flight, Chinese state television reported, citing China Eastern.

Media cited a rescue official as saying the plane had disintegrated and caused a fire destroying bamboo trees. The People's Daily quoted a provincial firefighting department official as saying there was no sign of life among the debris.

State media showed a piece of the plane on a scarred, earthen hillside. There was no sign of a fire or personal belongings.

The aircraft, with 123 passengers and nine crew on board, lost contact over the city of Wuzhou, China's Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) and the airline said.

The flight left Kunming at 1:11pm (0511 GMT), FlightRadar24 data showed, and had been due to land in Guangzhou at 3:05pm (0705 GMT).

The plane, which Flightradar24 said was six years old, had been cruising at 29,100 feet at 0620 GMT. Just over two minutes and 15 seconds later, data showed it had descended to 9,075 feet.

Twenty seconds later, its last tracked altitude was 3,225 feet.

Crashes during the cruise phase of flights are relatively rare even though this phase accounts for the majority of flight time. Boeing said last year only 13% of fatal commercial accidents globally between 2011 and 2020 occurred during the cruise phase, whereas 28% occurred on the final approach and 26% on landing.

"Usually the plane is on auto-pilot during cruise stage. So it is very hard to fathom what happened," said Li Xiaojin, a Chinese aviation expert.

Online weather data showed partly cloudy conditions with good visibility in Wuzhou at the time of the crash.

President Xi Jinping called for investigators to determine the cause of the crash as soon as possible, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

A Boeing spokesperson said: "We are aware of the initial media reports and are working to gather more information."

Meanwhile, an unidentified number of flights departing from Kunming, Yunnan Province, operated by China Eastern Airlines Monday afternoon were cancelled, including flights to Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, and Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province.

The aircraft involved is a Boeing 737, belonging to the Yunnan subsidiary of China Eastern Airlines and has been in operation of just over six and a half years.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the immediate activation of the emergency mechanism for the plane crash, sparing no efforts on search and rescue, and properly handling of the aftermath.

The State Council will assign officials to deal with the accident as a priority, identify the cause as soon as possible, and strengthen the investigation of safety hazards in civil aviation to ensure the absolute safety of aviation operations and people's lives in the future.

Prime Minister Imran Khan said, meanwhile, that Islamabad shares the grief with Beijing after a China Eastern passenger jet crash.

"Deeply saddened by the tragic loss of lives in the passenger plane crash in China," the prime minister.

"We share the grief of our Chinese brothers and sisters and convey our deepest condolences and sympathies with the bereaved families," Imran said.