No survivors found after China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade

In China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade, the Boeing 737-800 — carrying 132 people — crashed Monday afternoon in a remote, mountainous region in the south of the country as it flew from Kunming to Guangzhou.Communications with the crew could not be established in the final moments before the airliner crashed, Chinese air crash investigators said at a Tuesday news conference.”The flight took off from Kunming at 1:16 p.m. and was flying normally. At around 2:21 p.m., it arrived over Wuzhou city of Guangxi province. The ground station noticed that the plane had a sudden altitude change, and then it lost communication with the plane, before the plane eventually crashed,” said Sun Shiying, a representative for China Eastern Airlines. The aircraft had passed pre-flight checks and the nine crew members were qualified and healthy, added Sun.The cause of the crash is not yet clear, an official from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said. “The investigation team will spare no effort to collect evidence from all parties and focus on search,” said the CAAC official.Investigators still haven’t located the plane’s black boxes, state broadcaster CCTV reported Tuesday, and are facing difficult terrain and poor weather.The black boxes are flight data and cockpit voice recorders which could hold crucial clues to how the disaster unfolded.The probe into the cause of the crash will be “very difficult,” warned investigators, due to how severely damaged the plane is.Photos and videos posted by state media show giant plumes of smoke rising above the mountains following the crash. Search and rescue crews wade through the thicket, scattered with debris and plane parts. Wallets, ID cards and fragments of a phone were among personal belongings strewn on the ground, The China Eastern Airlines plane was a Boeing 737-800, the most popular version of Boeing’s jets now in service and the workhorse of many airlines’ fleets. The plane that crashed Monday had been in service since 2015. The airline will ground all its Boeing 737-800 flights, CCTV reported. But other Chinese carriers will continue to operate the same aircraft type, according to state media.The 737-800 is part of a class of Boeing jets known as 737-NG, standing for “Next Generation.” These planes have had safety issues cited by US regulators, although none of those rose to the level of requiring the planes to be grounded.Boeing has sold more than 7,000 737-NG airliners worldwide and, until Monday, the type had seen only a dozen fatal accidents in its 25-year history.Boeing came under international scrutiny after its 737 Max, which succeeded the 737-800, suffered two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. Those crashes were shown to be caused by a flaw in the design of a new stabilization system, which the 737-800 does not have.