China Eastern Airlines logo is pictured at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, China, 21 March 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
BEIJING, April 17 – China Eastern Airlines (600115.SS) has started operating its Boeing 737-800 jets again for commercial flights, less than a month after a crash killed 132 people and the Company grounded 223 of those planes, the airline said on Sunday.
The airline said it had conducted systematic tests, structural reviews and verified airworthiness data on each of the planes and that test flights would be conducted on all planes before resuming commercial service.
Boeing 737-800 aircraft with registration numbers close to those that crashed March 21 are still being serviced and assessed, the company told Reuters in a statement.
Earlier in the day, data from Flightradar24 showed that China Eastern flight MU5843, operated by a three-year-old Boeing 737-800, departed the southwestern city of Kunming at 09:58 (0158 GMT) on Sunday and departed at 11am landed in Chengdu, also in southwest China, at :03 am.
This aircraft, which completed a test flight on Saturday, later returned to Kunming, according to Flightradar24.
Another Boeing 737-800 jet conducted a test flight early Sunday in Shanghai, where China Eastern is based, data from Flightradar24 showed.
On March 21, flight MU5735, en route from Kunming to Guangzhou, crashed in the mountains of Guangxi, killing 123 passengers and nine crew members in mainland China’s deadliest air disaster in 28 years.
China retrieved both black boxes and announced that it would submit a preliminary report to the UN aviation agency ICAO within 30 days of the event. Continue reading
Reporting by Stella Qiu and Ryan Woo; Edited by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Helen Popper