The chances of solving the pressing question of why the China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 jet hit the ground at rocket speed, instantly killing all 132 people on board, suddenly look more hopeful.
Searchers have found one of the plane’s flight recorders — the cockpit voice recorder — at the crash site near Wuzhou, China. Given the severity of the impact, it’s not surprising that according to Chinese investigators at the scene, the outer casing is severely deformed, but the hard drives storing the data “are also partially damaged, but relatively complete,” according to a Chinese official.
While the cockpit recorder data is valuable in providing an audio recording of many alarms sounding and exchanges between the pilot and co-pilot, they are far less helpful in identifying what happened to the aircraft itself. This information is stored in real-time detail in the other black box, the flight data recorder, which is yet to be found. Because this recorder is better protected as it is located in the tail of the aircraft and not in the nose, if found it will provide a definitive technical image that would be meaningful in the event of an investigation.
The last time data was retrieved from a black box in such a critical state was after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in March 2019. That was the second fatal crash of the latest 737 model, the 737MAX, a disaster that led to Grounding resulted in the entire fleet of these jets. And although both of those crashes were caused by a system not installed on China Eastern’s Boeing 737-800, the end result was identical: a horrifying, near-vertical dive into the ground at around 700 mph. The impact forces on the flight recorders of both 737 types would have been the same.
The MAX disasters both happened during the plane’s exit after takeoff, while the Chinese pilots were about to begin their descent after a completely uneventful shuttle flight from Kunming to Guangzhou in good weather. They were then crippled so suddenly that they did not call 911 on May Day.
Rescuers search for the black boxes at a plane crash site in Tengxian County, Wuzhou.
Zhou Hua/Xinhua via Reuters
In the case of the Ethiopian crash, the black boxes were sent to one of the world’s most respected investigative teams, the Bureau d’Enqetes et d’Analyses, BEA, a laboratory in Paris staffed by French plane crash investigators. French technicians were able to download the flight recorder data within three days of receiving it – with damning evidence that, just like the first 737 MAX crash of a Lion Air jet six months earlier in Indonesia, rogue software was in control pilots had taken over and, despite their desperate efforts to recover, had forced the jet into a fatal crash.
China has invested heavily in its flight safety system, taking inspiration from both the US National Transportation Board’s technology and the example of the BEA. At the moment, the Chinese recorder is being handled in a lab run by their security officials in Beijing. At the same time, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said he was heartened by the news that NTSB investigators had been invited to China to take part in the investigation.
After the crash, China Eastern immediately grounded its fleet of 60 737-800s. In fact, China operates 24.6 percent of the world’s fleet of this model, the largest in the world. (North American airlines fly 22.8 percent of the fleet and Europe 22.1 percent, according to Aviation Week data). China is the fastest growing domestic air travel market in the world: although the Covid-19 pandemic initially halted air travel, China recovered faster than many other nations and now there are more than 12,500 domestic flights per day.
But because the Chinese are so new to the usefulness of intercity jet travel, and because China has had an exemplary record of aviation safety up until now, the China Eastern disaster has made it clear how a crash, although statistically not very significant, can deal a severe blow to public confidence. With this crash having no apparent antecedents in the history of the 737-800, a jet as reliable as it is ubiquitous, Chinese authorities are now under intense pressure to show they can conduct a successful investigation.