Search for clues at site of China Eastern Boeing 737 crash that killed 132

Investigators say air traffic controllers noticed the flight’s sudden descent but got no response when calling pilots

Mud-stained wallets. Bank cards. Official identity cards. Poignant reminders of 132 lost lives were lined up by rescue workers on a Chinese mountainside as they combed the wreckage of a Boeing 737 that inexplicably plunged from the sky.

No survivors have been found from China Eastern flight MU5735, which crashed outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region while flying from Kunming to Guangzhou.

The crash ignited a fire big enough to be seen on Nasa satellite images before firefighters managed to extinguish it.

Video clips posted by China’s state media show small pieces of the Boeing 737-800 aircraft scattered over a wide forested area, some in green fields, others in burnt-out patches of bare earth left after trees were destroyed by fire. Each piece of debris has a number next to it, the larger ones marked off by police tape.

Search teams planned to work through the night using their hands, picks, sniffer dogs and other equipment to look for survivors, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The steep, rough terrain and the huge size of the debris field were complicating the search for the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, otherwise known as the “black boxes”, CCTV and the official Xinhua news agency said.

Drones were being used to search among fragments of wreckage that were scattered across both sides of the mountain into which the plane crashed, state media reported.

As family members gathered at the destination and departure airports, whatever had caused the plane to drop out of the sky shortly before it should have begun its descent into the southern China metropolis of Guangzhou remained a mystery.

Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at China’s Civil Aviation Administration, said efforts were focused on finding the black boxes and that it was too early to speculate on a possible cause of the crash.

He said an air traffic controller had tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply, but got no reply.

“If they were dealing with an emergency, pilots are taught to ‘aviate, navigate, then communicate’ – meaning fly the plane first,” said William Waldock, a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

“If it was some sort of major mechanical problem, they may have had their hands full trying to control the aircraft.”

The crash left a deep pit in the mountainside about the size of a football field, Xinhua said, citing reports from rescuers. Chen Weihao, who saw the falling plane while working on a farm, told the news agency it had hit a gap in the mountain where nobody lived.

No foreigners were on board, China’s foreign ministry said.

The six-year-old aircraft was about an hour into its flight at an altitude of 29,000 feet when it entered a steep, fast dive.

Associated Press