Cause Of China Eastern Plane Crash Remains A Mystery One Month Later

One month after China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735 plunged out of the sky while beginning its descent to a destination in Guangxi, killing all 132 people on board, a report issued by China’s Civil Aviation Administration of China claimed that no irregularities had been found regarding the plane or its crew – meaning that after a month of investigation, the cause of the crash remained a mystery.

The report claimed that investigators are still trying to extract data from the heavily damaged black boxes and the cockpit voice recorder – data that might offer some insight into the plane’s condition and the crew’s actions in the final minutes of the flight. The US National Transportation Safety Board is helping Chinese investigators in their efforts to download information from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, Fox News reports.

Both black boxes are being analyzed by American experts at a government lab in Washington.

The crew, including the flight’s pilots, made no mention of any malfunctions or other issues that might have caused the crash at any point during the flight.

The crash left a crater measured to be 20 meters deep in the mountainside, shattered the plane and set off a fire in the surrounding forest. More than 49,000 pieces of plane debris were found. It took two days to find the cockpit voice recorder and six days for the flight data recorder, which was buried 1.5 meters (5 feet) underground.

Flight MU5735 was headed from the city of Kunming in southwestern China to Guangzhou, the capital city of southwestern Guangxi, a critical export hub for China, when it dropped out of the sky. 132 people, including 123 passengers and 9 crew, died during the crash.

As a precaution, China Eastern and its subsidiaries grounded all their Boeing 737-800s – the model of plane involved in the crash – which included more than 200 planes. But they have all since returned to service.

During the accident, the plane was cruising at 29,100 feet and began a sharp descent after 1420ET, briefly recovering more than 1,000 feet before resuming its dive before losing contact altogether as it fell more than 25,000 feet in about two minutes. The incident marked Chian’s deadliest passenger plane crash since 1994.