China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members from Kunming to Guangzhou when it crashed into the mountains in Guangxi on Monday afternoon, according to video footage and witness testimony.
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The plane plummeted more than 25,000 feet in less than three minutes and crashed into a mountain near the village of Molang in the city of Wuzhou, sparking a forest fire.
The cause of the crash has puzzled aviation authorities and experts. The weather was fine, the pilots did not raise an alarm and the plane did not appear to have broken up in flight. China has one of the best flight safety records in the world.
Outgoing Federal Aviation Administrator Steve Dickson called the crashed Boeing aircraft “one of the safest aircraft ever made in commercial service.”
Hundreds of firefighters and rescue teams were dispatched to the scene, local officials said. The US National Transportation Safety Board has assembled a team of technical experts from the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and engine manufacturer CFM International to join the Chinese investigation into the crash.
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Search teams have located one of the two black boxes containing recorded information from the flight that may help investigators determine the cause of a crash. But the black box was badly damaged, China Aviation Administration official Mao Yanfeng said on Wednesday.
Passengers on the plane included a young couple who had brought their young daughter to Guangzhou for an operation, executives at a mining company in Guangzhou, a woman who had recently married and a woman who returned to Guangzhou after returning for the Lunar New Year, reported local media reported.
More than 500 family members came to the nearby city of Wuzhou to await information on the fate of relatives on board, Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
The plane crash in China is the deadliest since 1994, when a China Northwest Airlines plane crashed in Xian after an autopilot malfunction caused the plane to break up in midair, killing 160 people.