China Eastern Airlines Crashes in Southern China
A passenger plane with over 130 people on board crashed on Monday afternoon in a mountainous area of southern China, the Civil Aviation Administration of China confirmed, prompting rescue teams to rush to the steep, heavily wooded site in hope of finding survivors.
The Boeing 737 plane, operated by China Eastern Airlines, went down in the Guangxi region, and flames and smoke could be seen rising from a hillside, initial Chinese news reports said, according to pictures and videos shared from the scene. The fire was put out later Monday.
“The situation with casualties remains unclear,” said an online report issued by Chinese state television. Residents in the area told reporters that the plane appeared to have shattered into debris, dampening hopes of finding survivors. The company offered its condolences to the relatives of those on board in a news statement.
Initial reports said the plane, Flight 5735, crashed in Teng County in Guangxi while flying from Kunming, a city in southwest China, to Guangzhou, a city in the country’s far south. The plane was carrying 132 people, including 123 passengers and 9 crew members, according to the civil aviation administration. State media reports initially said 133 passengers were on board.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, quickly issued a statement calling for rescuers to do their utmost and “handle the aftermath in a proper manner.” The Chinese central government dispatched officials to the scene to deal with the disaster and investigation into its causes.
“Ensure the absolute safety of civil aviation operations,” Mr. Xi said in his instructions.
Officials in China have dispatched nearly 1,000 firefighters and 100 members of a local militia on a rescue mission to the site. According to Guangxi’s fire department, 117 emergency workers with about two dozen fire trucks have arrived on the scene.
 |
The plane, about seven years old, had been flying steadily on this flight until it abruptly lost altitude at around 2:20 p.m., flight data indicated.
The plane was not a Boeing 737 Max, a model that has not resumed flying in China after a ban prompted by deadly crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019.
Chinese state media said the airline has confirmed that there were no foreign passengers aboard the plane.
Family members of the flight’s crew have begun to gather at a China Eastern Airlines office in Yunnan Province, according to Chinese state media. 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 assist the families.
The crash could become one of China’s worst air disasters in many years, after a succession of deadly accidents in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, the country has established a relatively safe flying record, thanks to a young fleet of planes and stricter air controls.
Firefighters in Teng County were first alerted to a possible flight accident there in the afternoon, when villagers reported that they had come across debris from a plane, the China News Service reported.
By Monday night, more than 100 firefighters had arrived at the scene, with nearly 1,000 more on their way, according to Chinese officials. But the nighttime rescue efforts are expected to be hampered by the rains and heavy winds in the forecast.
John Liu, Liu Yi, Claire Fu , Amy Chang Chien and Nadav Gavrielov contributed reporting.
An earlier version of this article misstated the status of the orders of Boeing Max planes among Chinese airlines. Boeing has been looking to deliver Max planes ordered before the ban was imposed; the airlines have not announced new orders.
 |
The thunderous boom rippled across a tree-covered valley at midafternoon. China Eastern Airlines Flight MU-5735 had plunged to earth in a hilly part of rural southern China, where usually the loudest noises come from swarms of insects and villagers’ motorbikes.
At first, residents in Teng County in the Guangxi region were baffled by the explosion, they told Chinese news outlets. But soon those gathering around a hillside saw the signs of what may be China’s worst air accident in decades.
Plumes of smoke floated over the clusters of bamboo and banana trees. Farmers came across shards of wreckage, apparently from the plane’s wings and fuselage, some showing the lettering of China Eastern Airlines. And villagers gathered to put out some of the fires that had broken out in the hills, one said in a telephone interview with The New York Times.
Residents told Chinese news outlets that the plane, a Boeing 737 model, plunged sharply to earth in a sparsely populated area.
According to the state-owned China News Service, a resident from the village of Molang, whom the news service cited by only his last name, Liu, said he rode his motorbike to the site with three other villagers to see if they could help with the rescue. They saw parts of the plane scattered on the site, strips of cloth hanging on trees, and a fire that stretched across more than 10 acres. But they didn’t see any remains, he told the news service.
In an interview on state-owned TV, Ou Ling, a fire department official in Guangxi, noted that the crash site is “a depression that is surrounded by mountains on three sides,” adding that “there is no electricity at the site.”
The remote nature of the site makes it inaccessible to large rescue equipment, he said.
He said that public security officials had arrived to secure the scene and that, in order to avoid endangering rescue workers, “unnecessary rescue forces have been withdrawn and are now on standby, while emergency teams such as firefighters and armed police were retained on site to carry out work.”
Nearly 1,000 firefighters and 100 members of a local militia were dispatched by Chinese officials to the crash site. As night fell, the forecast called for rain and heavy winds, weather sure to hamper the rescue effort.
At the flight’s scheduled destination, Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, some 150 miles away, friends and relatives who had gone there to greet arriving passengers from the flight now waited for news of any survivors among the 132 onboard.
Claire Fu contributed research.
Comments