China Plane CrashBoeing 737-800 Crashes in Remote Mountain Valley in Southern China

China sends emergency teams, top official to oversee first full day of rescue.

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A Boeing 737-800 passenger plane operated by China Eastern Airlines carrying more than 130 people went down in a mountainous area of the Guangxi region.

Thousands of firefighters, police officers and paramilitary troops assembled Tuesday to search for any survivors of a passenger plane that crashed into a steep, heavily wooded site in southern China.

The Boeing 737 plane, operated by China Eastern Airlines, went down Monday afternoon in the Guangxi region, and flames and smoke could be seen rising from a hillside, 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.

Source: Flightradar24

By Pablo Robles

Rescuers at the crash site picked through the debris, but the nighttime search efforts were hampered by a lack of electricity and the remote location. Rain was forecast for Tuesday, which could make search efforts more difficult.

Chinese vice premier, Liu He — a powerful official who usually steers economic policy — has been assigned to oversee the rescue effort and investigation into the causes of the disaster.

Pictures and video showed a frenzy of activity as the rescuers poured into the area, assembling tents and command posts, setting up power supplies and lights, and lining up dozens of ambulances in the hope of finding anyone alive. Dozens of local volunteers on motorbikes also carried in water, food and tents.

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.

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Rescuers at the site of a plane crash in Tengxian county, Guangxi region, where a China Eastern plane with 132 on board went down Monday.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Boeing released a statement on Twitter in which the company said: “Our thoughts are with the passengers and crew of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU 5735. We are working with our airline customer and are ready to support them.”

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 were gathering 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.

John Liu, Liu Yi, Claire Fu, Amy Chang Chien, Li You, and Nadav Gavrielov contributed research and reporting.

A correction was made on 
March 21, 2022

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.

How we handle corrections

The China Eastern plane descended more than 20,000 feet in just over a minute.

30,000 feet

Gap in radar data

Plane begins a near vertical

drop around 2:20 p.m.

20,000

Plane briefly ascended

at roughly 8,000 feet

10,000

First transmission,

shortly after takeoff

1:15 p.m.

1:30

1:45

2:00

2:15

30,000 feet

Gap in radar data

Plane begins a near vertical

drop around 2:20 p.m.

20,000

10,000

Plane briefly ascended

at roughly 8,000 feet

First transmission,

shortly after takeoff

1:15 p.m.

1:30

1:45

2:00

2:15

Times given in China Standard Time.

Source: Flightradar24

China Eastern Airlines’ Flight MU-5735 left Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, at 1:11 p.m. on Monday for what should have been an hour-and-a-half flight east to Guangzhou, a major commercial city in southeastern China.

After an hour, though, the flight turned horribly wrong, according to data from Flightradar24, a tracking platform.

About 2:20 p.m., it “suddenly started to lose altitude very fast,” Flightradar24 said in a tweet.

The plane was cruising at an altitude of 29,100 feet when, in just over a minute, it lost more than 21,000 feet. It appeared to briefly regain altitude around 8,000 feet before continuing its plunge, according to Flightradar24’s data.

A manager for Wuzhou City Beichen Mining, Liao Wenhui, confirmed by telephone that their surveillance camera caught an image that appeared to be a plane plunging directly toward earth, but refused to say more.

The plane was in the far east of the Guangxi region, where weather reports don’t suggest any possible contributing factors. Temperatures reached a high of 86 degrees Fahrenheit around 2 p.m., according to the China Meteorological Administration. Winds were moderate at less than 12 miles per hour, and visibility was 10 miles. Rain was forecast for the evening, but no precipitation had been measured at the time of the crash.

China Eastern Airlines has dispatched a team to the crash site in Wuzhou City, according to state-owned media.

Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting.

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A deafening boom, a plume of smoke: Farmers describe a plane plunging from the sky.

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A still from a video on CCTV, China’s state television, showing emergency personnel preparing to travel to the site of a plane crash in southern China, on Monday.Credit...CCTV, via Associated Press

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 and Li You contributed research.

The Boeing 737-800 NG is widely used around the world.

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A Delta Air Lines Boeing 737-800 NG commercial flight lands at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2020.Credit...Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

The Boeing 737-800 NG, the model that crashed in China on Monday, is a workhorse of the skies.

There are nearly 25,000 passenger planes in service worldwide, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider. Of those, about 4,200, or 17 percent, are Boeing 737-800 NGs. China is home to nearly 1,200 of those planes, followed by Europe, with nearly 1,000, and the United States, with nearly 800.

American Airlines has 265 737-800 NGs in service, while Southwest Airlines has 205, United Airlines has 136 and Delta Air Lines has 77, according to Cirium. Boeing delivered nearly 5,000 of the planes to customers between 1998 and 2020, according to Boeing data.

China is the largest market for Boeing planes after the United States. Last year, Boeing forecast that the number of commercial planes in China would double by 2040, with Chinese airlines needing 8,700 new aircraft by then, valued at about $1.47 trillion.

The country is perhaps more crucial for Boeing’s leading rival, Airbus. Last year, Airbus delivered 142 commercial aircraft to China, its largest single-country market, representing a quarter of Airbus’s global commercial aircraft production.

Airbus has a mammoth assembly line in the city of Tianjin, producing the A320 single-aisle planes and A330 wide-body passenger jets. It also has relationships with Chinese airline and helicopter operators, and many components in Airbus jets are made by Chinese companies. The value of the Airbus and Chinese cooperation reached around $500 million in 2015.

Liz Alderman contributed reporting.

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Shares of Boeing are lower after the China Eastern plane crash.

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The Hong Kong stock index on Monday. China Eastern shares finished lower after the crash.Credit...Vincent Yu/Associated Press

The crash of a Boeing airliner in China on Monday follows years of upheaval for the American manufacturer, raising the prospect of renewed regulatory scrutiny and sending its stock sharply lower.

Boeing shares ended the day down 3.6 percent on Wall Street after a Boeing 737-800 NG operated by China Eastern plunged from the sky on a domestic flight with more than 130 people aboard. China Eastern shares closed 6.5 percent lower Monday in trading in Hong Kong.

There is no clear indication as to the cause of the crash, and accident investigations can go on for months, even years, before an official determination is made. But the answer will carry significant weight for Boeing, which has faced recent trouble with two flagship planes: the single-aisle 737 Max and the twin-aisle 787 Dreamliner.

“I think it’s going to be very important to see what actually happened with this particular incident because there’s a credibility concern,” said Rob Spingarn, managing director at Melius Research, a financial analysis firm. “I think the investment community will pause to some extent on Boeing until that information is out.”

An industrial icon, Boeing is the largest manufacturing exporter in the United States, one of the federal government’s biggest contractors, a blue chip stock and a major employer whose fortunes help shape the U.S. economy.

The Max, the latest generation of Boeing’s flagship 737 aircraft family, was banned from flying globally in March 2019 after two fatal crashes in which 346 people were killed. The United States approved the plane for flight again in late 2020, spurring similar approval from other countries around the world.

But there has been an important holdout: China, which had been expected to clear the plane to resume flying in the coming months. The fate of that approval may now be intertwined with the investigation into the crash involving the 737-800 NG, industry analysts said. Chinese government officials may feel uncomfortable approving the Max while they are investigating a crash involving its predecessor, the analysts said.

Those crashes were directly tied to flight-control software known as MCAS, which the Max is the only commercial airliner to use.

On Monday, Boeing said that it was in touch with China Eastern Airlines and with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that will take the lead should China ask for U.S. assistance.

Boeing also said that its “technical experts are prepared to assist with the investigation led by the Civil Aviation Administration of China.” The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration also said that it “is ready to assist” in an investigation if asked.

The plane crash is the latest test of Xi Jinping’s leadership.

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China’s leader Xi Jinping issued orders to spare no effort to rescue any survivors.Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

Even before rescuers had began working through the plane wreckage, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, issued orders to spare no effort to rescue any survivors from the country’s worst aviation crash in many years.

“Instantly initiate the emergency response mechanisms and put everything into organizing search and rescue,” Mr. Xi said in instructions issued by Chinese official news outlets. “Step up safety checks in the civil aviation sector,” he added. “Ensure that people’s lives are absolutely safe.”

That promise of safety for Chinese citizens has become an important symbol of Mr. Xi’s authority. Mr. Xi, China’s most dominant leader in decades, has often cast the ruling Communist Party as the country’s savior. The air crash — the country’s first big aviation disaster in over a decade — will add to the issues facing him amid the pandemic and a war in Ukraine.

The Chinese government has been grappling with its biggest outbreak of Covid-19 cases since early in 2020, when the coronavirus spread out from central China.

With the war in Ukraine, Chinese officials had at first dismissed the likelihood of war and did not announce plans to evacuate citizens. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Beijing scrambled to evacuate Chinese nationals.

Last year, local officials faced widespread public anger after nearly 400 people died in central China’s Henan Province after immense rainfall in July flooded tunnels, subways and homes.

Most Chinese people are unlikely to hold Mr. Xi personally accountable for an airplane disaster. But his promise of accountability for the crash will raise expectations for a quick and thorough inquiry into why the China Eastern Airlines flight plunged to the ground.

Chinese state media also reported that the premier, Li Keqiang, ordered that officials “issue information truthfully and promptly, and conscientiously and solemnly get to the cause of the accident.”

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China’s recent air safety record is strong, after a troubled past.

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A China Eastern employee holding a sign on Monday to lead relatives of the plane crash victims to a cordoned-off area in Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport.Credit...ChinaTopix, via Associated Press

BEIJING — The plane crash on Monday in southern China is unusual in a country that had a spate of deadly air accidents in the early 1990s but then overhauled its procedures and produced one of the world’s best air safety records over the past two decades.

“Historically it was questionable, but in the new era, it has been very good from a safety point of view,” said David Yu, a finance professor specializing in aviation at the Shanghai campus of New York University.

China Eastern Airlines has a history of safe flying and had gone nearly two decades without a deadly crash, according to aviation safety databases. But in its earlier history, the airline had a series of disasters.

The last deadly Chinese Eastern crash was in 2004, when a Bombardier CRJ-200 flying from the city of Baotou in Inner Mongolia to Shanghai plunged into a frozen lake shortly after takeoff, killing 55 people. The disaster was caused by ice on the wings, safety regulators said.

In 1989, just over a year after the airline was founded, an Antonov AN-24RV lost engine power on takeoff from Shanghai, killing 34. In 1993, a China Eastern crew member accidentally deployed slats on the wings of a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, forcing an emergency landing at a U.S. Air Force base in Alaska. Two passengers died.

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Rescuers searched for the black boxes at the crash site of a China Eastern plane in Baotou, in China’s Inner Mongolia region, in 2004.Credit...Li Xin/Xinhua, via Associated Press

The Chinese airline industry has one of the world’s newer fleets of planes. That is because Chinese airlines have been among the world’s biggest buyers of new planes over the past decade, as rising prosperity in China has fed a big surge in domestic and international air travel.

Until the pandemic, Chinese airlines hired a sizable share of their pilots from overseas, as air travel grew faster than China’s ability to train its own pilots. China developed a reputation for offering some of the world’s highest salaries for experienced foreign pilots.

But many of these foreign pilots returned to their home countries in the past couple years as China has halted almost all international air travel during the pandemic, and as domestic travel has shrunk somewhat as well. Chinese airlines now rely almost entirely on Chinese pilots, Mr. Yu said.

China has been designing its own alternative to the Boeing 737-800 that crashed on Monday. That alternative, the C-919, is being built in Shanghai by a state-owned company. China Eastern is set to be the first airline to operate the C-919 in the months ahead, through one of its subsidiaries.

Austin Ramzy contributed reporting,

China Eastern is the nation’s second-biggest carrier.

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China Eastern Airlines is the second-largest carrier by passengers in China.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters

China Eastern Airlines is the second-largest carrier by passengers in China, operating more than 700 planes on domestic and international routes.

Based in Shanghai, the airline flies to 177 countries, according to its website. The Boeing 737-800 that crashed on Monday in southern China was a twin-engine, single aisle aircraft. It had been flying for over six years, having been delivered to China Eastern from Boeing in June 2015, according to The Associated Press.

“The cause of the plane crash is still under investigation, and the company will actively cooperate with relevant investigations,” the airline said in a statement on Monday night.

“The company expresses its deep condolences to the passengers and crew members who died in the plane crash.”

The airline traces its lineage back to the first squadron established by what was then the Civil Aviation Administration of Shanghai in January 1957. China Eastern Airlines Corporation Limited was established in 1988 and listed on stock exchanges in New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1997. It became, according to a company profile, the first airline listed on three markets together.

The Chinese government is a major shareholder.

Over the years, China Eastern has been awarded the Golden Ting Award, Best Public Company, World Most Improved Airline, and Most Popular Airlines in Asia, the airline says.

After the crash on Monday, the company’s Weibo page changed to gray, black and white, as did its website in China.

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The crash came amid strict Covid travel rules in China.

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A plane arriving at the Beijing Capital International Airport for the 2022 Winter Paralympic Games in February.Credit...Ennio Leanza/EPA, via Shutterstock

Monday’s crash of a passenger plane with 132 people on board comes as travel around China remains tightly controlled three years into the pandemic.

Commercial air traffic has not fully rebounded to pre-Covid levels, and a recent jump in coronavirus cases has prompted new restrictions and dampened demand for travel.

According to FlightAware, an industry data firm, commercial air traffic in China for the week of March 13 to March 20 was down 67 percent from the same period in 2019. Flight suspensions began in late January 2020, followed by a gradual recovery that has since been undermined by the spread of the Omicron variant.

The decline in air traffic stems in part from the government’s extensive restrictions aimed at eliminating outbreaks. To travel within China, residents need a negative P.C.R. test result, and they must also show that they have not been recently infected or have been in close contact with someone that was ill, however brief.

Travelers must show their Covid health status on a phone app that flags anyone the surveillance system deems to be at risk. And China’s sweeping definition of risk has meant that in many areas even people some distance from a confirmed carrier can be flagged on the system.

China has no centralized national system for classing who is at risk of carrying the virus, so travelers face the worry that a city or province will abruptly block them from leaving, or refuse them entry if they want to return home.

In the wake of the recent disruptions, Chinese leaders have told officials to use more focused measures to contain Covid outbreaks. But China remains a long way from abandoning “zero Covid” as a goal, and international flights to and from the country are likely to remain heavily restricted for some time.

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