China plane crash: Human remains found as search for second black box continues

On Wednesday, rescue teams found human remains and recovered one of the black box flight recorders from the wreckage of a China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed in southern China on Monday, even as the search area was expanded Thursday for the second black box from a China Eastern passenger jet that crashed in southern China with 132 people on board earlier this week, state broadcaster CCTV said.

Authorities have yet to declare the number of victims, but there has been no sign so far that any of the 132 people onboard had survived.

Investigators still do not know why the plane suddenly entered a near-vertical dive in southern China on Monday. But the recovery of the intact cockpit voice recorder is hoped to shed clues.

The black box was found damaged on the outside but its internal records appeared to be fine, officials said. It has been sent to Beijing for its data to be analysed.

The Boeing 737-800 was cruising at 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) when it suddenly nose-dived into a remote mountainous area on Monday, setting off a fire in the surrounding forest that could be seen in NASA satellite images. No survivors have been found.

Searchers have been using hand tools, metal detectors, drones and sniffer dogs to comb the heavily forested and steep slopes. Wallets, identity and bank cards and human remains have been found.

More than 300 rescue workers remain at the crash site in a remote area near Wuzhou in Teng County, Guangxi province. Work was suspended briefly on Wednesday due to poor weather, but an evening briefing revealed some human remains had been located.

Some details of passengers have begun to emerge in Chinese state media. In China Youth Daily, a man who gave the pseudonym Wang Baiyang said his 26-year-old sister, her husband and their 18-month old daughter were onboard and that it had been their first ever flight. They were flying to Guangazhou for medical treatment for the child, and had originally been scheduled on an earlier flight but it was cancelled.

“For the past two days, I felt like I had a dream, and I always felt that when I woke up the next day, my sister would call me,” he said. “I didn’t think it was real at all, first my grandfather died, and then I heard the news of the flight, and I just froze there and tried to reach my sister through the phone.”

CCTV news showed police in olive- and dark-colored rain gear standing in a cleared area on Thursday, some with bare or white-gloved hands atop long-handled tools that appear to be shovels or sickles. They all wore surgical masks.

Recovering the so-called black boxes — they are usually painted orange for visibility — is considered key to figuring out what caused the crash.

Cockpit voice recorders can capture voices, audio alerts and background sounds from the engine or even switches being moved. The flight data recorder stores information about the plane’s airspeed, altitude and direction up or down, as well as pilot actions and the performance of important systems.

Investigators have said it is too early to speculate on the cause. An air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply, but got no reply, officials have said.

The China Eastern flight was headed from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, to Guangzhou, a major city and export manufacturing hub on China’s southeastern coast. China Eastern, headquartered in Shanghai, is one of China’s four major airlines.

(with inputs from AP)

Published on: Thursday, March 24, 2022, 11:12 AM IST