CHINESE ACCIDENT
BEIJING (China), 24th March (EFE). Rescue teams in the area of south China’s Guangxi region, where a Boeing 737800 with 132 people on board crashed on Monday, found human remains in the last few hours and allegedly an engine out the plane, the state chain CGTN reported today.
Currently, rescue workers have covered an area of about 46,000 square meters in search and rescue operations and found no signs of survivors.
The engine’s find this Wednesday adds the location of one of the device’s black boxes, specifically the one that records the voices in the cabin, which was sent to Beijing for expert inspection.
“An initial inspection shows that the exterior of the receiver is badly damaged. The storage unit was also damaged but remained intact,” Zhu Tao, chief of security at China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CACC), said last night.
Downloading and analyzing the data recorded in the black box “will take some time,” Zhao warned, adding that the device “will provide important information about the cause of the accident.”
“Air traffic controllers have tried multiple times to contact the crew but have received no response,” Zhu said, adding that authorities “still have no clear idea what happened” and that “they are thoroughly investigating various factors, such as meteorology, air traffic control and maintenance, design and manufacture of the ship.
For reasons still unknown, the plane, operated by China Eastern airline, crashed nearly 8,000 meters in less than three minutes before crashing into a remote mountainous area, the orography of which has made the work difficult, according to flight tracking portal FlightRadar24.
Weather conditions also hampered the search, which forced it to be temporarily halted on Wednesday due to rain and “risk of small landslides,” state broadcaster CCTV said.
The passage of time and the force of the impact of the plane, which according to some witnesses “fell” from the sky, means that hope of finding survivors is dwindling.
The airline managed to contact relatives of the 123 people on board in the hours after the accident, and according to local media, many of them have gone to the city of Wuzhou near the site of the impact while the search continues.