The Chinese Communist Party, local officials of Guangxi and Yunnan are yet to release an official statement on the number of dead in the MU5735 Boeing 737-800 flight which crashed onto a hilly forest on Monday.
The flight carried more than 132 people on board including crew members and no one is expected to survive the crash which caused a forest fire – the footage of which was widely released on Chinese social media apps and websites – at the site of the crash.
Rescue teams still remain on the spot and the likelihood of survivors are slim. China’s state-run news agency Global Times citing an unverified video said that the flight fell vertically – nose first – into the hilly forest in South China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
A report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) also said that the flight was hurtling towards the hilly forest, descending at almost 31,000 feet per minute, before it crashed. The news agency cited a report from Flightradar24 which showed that the plane was cruising at 29,100 feet at around 2:20pm local time following its takeoff before beginning to descend suddenly.
Juan Browne, a Boeing 777 pilot and popular aviation vlogger, told the SCMP that it was unusual for a flight to end up in that near-vertical position.
The Chinese cabinet said that it is dealing ‘with the accident as a priority, identify the cause as soon as possible, and strengthen the investigation of safety hazards in the civil aviation sector to ensure the absolute safety of aviation operations and people’s lives’, according to Global Times.
The MU5735 took off from Kunming Changshui airport in Southwest China’s Yunnan province and was scheduled to arrive at Guangzhou, South China’s Guangdong province.
Investigators are on the spot and are yet to retrieve the black box of the plane. The Black Box is a crucial device inside a plane which records aircraft performance, pilot input and cockpit audio and other related information.
Officials are also likely to probe the videos collected by people of the crash. Two more videos have surfaced – one captured by a security camera operated by a local mining company and another is from a dashcam from a car travelling nearby. Officials have told Chinese news outlets that there are no chances of survivors from the crash.
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