A plane crash in China had given up puzzles in March. Virtually out of the blue, the Boeing 737-800 crashed vertically to the ground. Evidence suggests that the tragedy was probably no accident.
Rescue workers and investigators work at the crash site of a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 on March 24, 2022.
Two months after a China Eastern Airlines passenger plane crashed in southern China, investigators are apparently getting closer to the cause. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the crash was not an accident. Someone in the cockpit reportedly crashed the Boeing 737-800 by pushing the stick forward to maneuver the plane into a nosedive. “The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” the newspaper quoted an unnamed US official source as saying.
The machine fell almost vertically from the sky on March 22, 2022. All 132 passengers perished.
Probably caused by the pilot
The focus is apparently initially on a crew member, probably a pilot, but someone else could have entered the cockpit and caused the crash on purpose. It was striking that the pilots did not respond at all to calls from air traffic controllers and attempts to contact other aircraft.
Experts examine the debris from the crashed passenger plane.
China’s aviation authority (CAAC) did not comment directly on the report. The party-affiliated newspaper “Global Times” only reported on the investigations by the Chinese CAAC and the US Aviation Safety Authority (NTSB) that the authorities “had not given any relevant information from the investigations to the media”. According to the International Air Transport Convention, the American NTSB supports the investigations led by China. The Americans also analyze the information from the flight recorder.
A mystery from the start
The circumstances surrounding the crash had been a mystery from the start. The almost seven-year-old 737-800 was flying at a cruising altitude of almost nine kilometers in good weather when, from one moment to the next, it shot almost vertically to the ground at a rapid rate of descent of almost 31,000 feet (9450 meters) per minute. The plane crashed into a hill near the city of Wuzhou in the southern Chinese region of Guangxi, around 300 kilometers west of the metropolis of Guangzhou.
According to the Chinese authorities, there have been no indications of possible technical problems to date. The investigators therefore focused on the actions of the pilots, writes the Wall Street Journal. The 737-800 is a common predecessor of Boeing’s 737 Max. It does not have the systems that fatally crashed two 737 Max in 2018 and 2019.
Remembering the Germanwings case of 2015
It’s rare for a jet to suddenly fall out of the sky mid-flight. The accident is reminiscent of the crash of the Germanwings plane, which a co-pilot intentionally crashed into a mountain in the French Alps in March 2015. All 150 people on board were killed.
A similar accident happened in Mozambique in 2013. According to the 2015 investigation report, the captain caused the Embraer 190 to crash on purpose. He had previously locked the cockpit door from the inside to prevent the second pilot from re-entering the cockpit. 33 people died in the crash.