A day after a Boeing 737 plane crashed in southern China, hundreds of firefighters, police officers and paramilitary troops combed the region’s lush hills in search of survivors. Orthopedic surgeons and burn specialists waited in nearby hospitals. Students lined up for blood donations, according to Chinese news reports on Tuesday.
At the crash site, workers found burnt ID cards, wallets, cell phones and other belongings, according to news reports. But the odds that one of the 132 people on board the plane would have made it alive seemed to be getting smaller and smaller.
The China Eastern Airlines plane, flight MU5735, had plunged 29,000 feet into the air on Monday in Teng County in the Guangxi region, scattering burning debris across the remote countryside.
An employee who answered the phone at the Wuzhou People’s Hospital near the crash site on Tuesday said the hospital had no word on survivors yet. And official Chinese media hinted that people should prepare for the worst.
“Wreckage and debris have been found, but no survivors have been found to date,” reports China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, citing rescue workers.
An aerial photo posted by a state news station showed a deep, charred gash in the land the plane made when it hit a terraced farmland. Another report shared images of the same area covered in white rubble.
“Survivors would be a miracle in the midst of tragedy,” Wang Ya’nan, the editor of the Chinese magazine Aerospace Knowledge, told The Beijing News. After the plane hit the hill at high speed and set fires, he said, “The chances of anyone from the plane surviving is miniscule.”
The search effort is likely to increasingly focus on looking for the remains of passengers, as well as for evidence of the cause of the crash. Above all, the hunt will be on so-called black boxes containing flight data and voice recorders that can contain second-by-second information about the plane’s abrupt fall from the sky.
“The plane crashed into the mountain,” Li Chenbin, a technician in the area of the crash, told the China News Service. “The whole plane had fallen apart, it lay in fragments scattered all over. I haven’t seen anyone who has experienced it.”
China’s track record of safe air travel over the past two decades has become a point of pride for officials and comfort for travelers.
Now the Chinese government, China Eastern Airlines and Boeing will come under pressure to help explain how a plane with such destructive power could hurtle toward Earth. Many people on Chinese social media sites have commented that China had gone 4,226 days without a major aviation accident, an enviable record after a string of disasters in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Boeing said in an emailed statement that “our technical experts are willing to assist with the investigation led by the Civil Aviation Administration of China.”
By late Monday, search teams had poured into the area, setting up tents and command posts, setting up power supplies and lights, and setting up dozens of ambulances in hopes of finding anyone alive. Dozens of local volunteers on motorcycles also carried water, food and tents.
But searches on Monday night were hampered by a lack of electricity and the remote location. Rain was forecast for Tuesday, making the search more difficult.
The plane was not a Boeing 737 Max, another model that has been relaunched almost everywhere except China after a global ban due to fatal crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019.
The United States government and Boeing have both offered to send investigators to help analyze the causes of the China Eastern crash. Chinese state media took note of the offer, without saying whether China will accept it.
Chinese state media said the airline has confirmed that there were no foreign passengers on board. This is not unusual, as China has almost completely closed its borders to foreigners since March 2020, in order to reduce the risk of Covid-19 infections entering the country.
According to Chinese state media, relatives of the plane’s crew had gathered at a China Eastern Airlines office in Yunnan province. The southwestern city of Kunming, where the plane took off, is the capital of Yunnan. A team is being set up at that office to help the families
On Monday afternoon, the identity of one of the missing and most likely deceased passengers was revealed: Fang Fang, the financial director of Dinglong Culture, a mining and commodities company in Yunnan province, where the flight began. Her company said she was on the run but denied rumors that six other company executives were also on it.
China’s Deputy Prime Minister Liu He — a powerful official who usually directs economic policy — has been appointed to oversee rescue efforts and investigate the causes of the disaster. On Monday, top leader Xi Jinping gave orders to make every effort in the search and rescue operation and the investigation into the cause of the crash.
China Eastern Airlines, Boeing and Chinese authorities have already sparked a flurry of speculation online about the cause. Aviation experts have said the plane’s unusual in-flight nosedive opened a range of possible explanations, including foul play or catastrophic equipment failure. But they widely stressed that it was too early to do more than guess why the plane sped down with no apparent warning signs.
A commentary on China’s Civil Aviation Administration news website warned against spreading rumors and conspiracy theories, urging the public to wait for a thorough investigation to yield its findings.
That article denied speculation that China Eastern Airlines had cut its aircraft maintenance budget. The company’s expenditure on maintenance increased by 12 percent between 2019 and 2021. A widespread Chinese online post on Monday claiming the crash followed cuts in the airline’s spending was censored Tuesday morning.
Previous investigations into air disasters in China have sometimes taken a year or two to publish their findings, noted another article on the Chinese Civil Aviation Authority’s website. Hu Xijin, a former editor of The Global Times, a widely read Chinese newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, suggested that the public should not wait so long for answers.
“Definitely don’t wait for the investigation to reach formal conclusions before releasing them to the public,” Mr Hu wrote on Weibo, a Chinese social media service. “It would be best to constantly release updates at a faster pace.”
Liu Yi research contributed.
