Authorities hope the recovery of one of the two light recorders on board will clarify the crash in the mountainous region of Guangxi.
Chinese recovery groups discovered one of the two black box flight recorders on the China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed on Monday with 132 other people on board, regulators said.
The domestic airliner sank more than 20,000 feet in a mountainous region of Guangxi, causing an intense bamboo chimney and nearly disintegrating with the impact. Those responsible for the reaction said the crash cases meant investigators faced “a very high point of difficulty” a cause.
No survivors have yet been discovered through rescuers who continue to search the mountainous and wooded area where the Boeing 737-800 crashed.
The plane is the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, in an initial assessment, an official from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said at a news conference.
“An initial inspection showed that the outside of the recorder was seriously broken, but the garage units, which are also broken to some extent, are relatively complete,” said Zhu Tao, director of the CAAC.
The black box is sent to a Beijing institute for decoding, how long it takes depends on the extent of the damage, Zhu said.
The flight recorders, one that captures the voice and one that captures the knowledge of flight, are painted bright orange and designed to cope with a sudden impact.
Flight MU5735 was en route to the port city of Guangzhou from Kunming, the capital of southwestern Yunnan province, on Monday when it fell from its cruising altitude to crash into the Guangxi Mountains less than an hour before the scheduled landing time.
The plane gave the impression of falling to the ground at an angle of about 35 degrees to the vertical in video footage from a vehicle’s dashboard camera, according to Chinese media.
Rain in southern China on Wednesday had earlier halted the search for victims with landslide hazards that could endanger rescuers wandering through the complicated and densely forested terrain, state television reported. The rainy weather was expected to last the rest of the week.
If, 64, a villager near the crash site who declined to give his name, told Reuters he heard a “bang, bang” at the time of the crash. “It’s like thunder,” he said.
State television showed photographs of plane wreckage strewn among trees burned by the fire. Burnt remains of ID cards and wallets were also seen.
Police set up a checkpoint in Lu Village when they approached and barred the hounds from entering. Several other people piled up for a small Buddhist rite nearby to pray for the victims.
The last commercial jet to crash in China in 2010, when an Embraer E-190 regional jet flying through Henan Airlines crashed, killing 44 of the 96 on board.
Underscoring fear at the highest level, Vice Premier Liu He visited Guangxi on Monday night to oversee search and rescue operations. An official of the same rank was also sent to the scene of the 2010 crash in northeast China.
The crisis comes as Boeing seeks to recover from several crises, adding the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on air travel and safety considerations about its 737 Max style after two fatal crashes.
“Accidents that start at a cruising altitude are regularly caused by weather conditions, planned sabotage or pilot error,” Dan Elwell, former head of the U. S. regulator at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), told Reuters. Elwell, who led the FAA’s 737-Max crisis, said mechanical problems with fashionable advertising planes were rare at cruising altitude.
The 737-800 was delivered on June 22, 2015 and accumulated 18,239 flight hours after 8,986 flights, Zhu told CAAC.
Chinese investigators are investigating why the crash happened there, but the U. S. government is still investigating the crash there. The U. S. Navy will help because the plane was made in the United States.