WUZHOU, China — Crash investigators on Tuesday said they do not yet know why a
China Eastern jet carrying 132 people plunged from the sky, with recovery teams still
scouring a forested mountainside for flight recorders from the pulverized
Boeing aircraft.
اضافة اعلان
No survivors had been found nearly 36 hours after Monday’s crash — the
deadliest air disaster in three decades in China, a country that had maintained
an enviable air safety record.
“With the current
information, we are unable to make a clear judgment on the cause of the
accident,” Zhu Tao, director of the aviation safety office at China’s aviation
authority, told reporters late Tuesday.
He said the focus
is now on “the search for flight recorders”.
Questions have
mounted over the cause of the crash, which saw the stricken jet drop 6,096m in
just over a minute before plunging into rugged terrain in southern China on
Monday afternoon.
The velocity of
the impact left twisted metal and passengers’ belongings scattered across a
swathe of forest.
The airline has
officially acknowledged that some aboard the jet, which was travelling from the
city of Kunming to the southern hub of
Guangzhou, had perished — but has
stopped short of declaring all on board as dead.
Contact has been
made with the families of all on board, said Sun Shiying, chairman of China
Eastern Airlines Yunnan.
The crashed
plane, which was nearly seven years old, had met all airworthiness requirements
pre-flight, he told reporters at Tuesday’s press conference.
President Xi
Jinping called for a full probe shortly after the crash as search teams armed
with drones descended upon the site in a rural area of Guangxi province.
The
Civil Aviation Administration of China has said it will conduct a two-week safety
inspection across the industry.
On Tuesday,
scorch marks were visible from the crash and resulting fire, rescue workers
told AFP, with one speculating that passengers had been “totally incinerated”
from the intensity of the blaze.
A villager near
the sprawling crash site, giving only his surname Ou, recounted hearing a
“sound like thunder” followed by a blaze that blistered the surrounding hills.
A torn wallet and
burned camera lens were among the eviscerated possessions captured on video by
a reporter from the state-run People’s Daily who was able to enter the crash
site.
But AFP
journalists were blocked at a hillside checkpoint by a group of men identifying
themselves as
Communist Party members who said they had “orders from above” to
prevent access.
The disaster occurred
after a high-speed vertical nosedive, according to a video carried by Chinese
media. AFP could not immediately verify the video’s authenticity.
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