China’s Civil Aviation Administration released a preliminary report Wednesday on the crash of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU3575 last month. The Boeing 737-800’s black boxes were severely damaged and investigators are still working on recovering data. File Photo by EPA-EFE
April 20 (UPI) — Chinese aviation officials issued a preliminary report Wednesday on the crash of China Eastern Flight MU3575 but were not able to shed light on the accident that killed all 132 people on board.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China said in the report that the Boeing 737-800 aircraft that plunged into a mountainside last month had been properly maintained and that there were no indications of navigation or monitoring instrument failure during the flight.
All crew members were qualified, the weather was clear along the route and the plane was not carrying any cargo classified as dangerous, the CAAC said.
The aircraft’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were “seriously damaged due to impact,” the report said, and investigators are still working on data recovery and analysis.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is helping to extract information from the black boxes, which will be crucial in figuring out what caused the jet to fall from the sky on March 21 as it flew from Kunming to the port city of Guangzhou.
Flight MU5735 took off at 1:16 p.m., reached a cruising altitude of around 29,000 feet, and entered Guangzhou air traffic space at 2:17 p.m., the report said.
Air traffic controllers noticed the plane had deviated from its proper altitude at 2:20 p.m. and contacted the crew but received no reply. The plane dropped off radar at 2:21 p.m. and plummeted into a heavily forested mountainside near the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi Province, sparking a fire.
Prior to the accident, there had been no unusual communications between the crew and air traffic controllers, the CAAC said.
China Eastern Airlines grounded its fleet of 232 Boeing 737-800 planes after the crash to conduct safety inspections. The Shanghai-based carrier resumed commercial flights with the jet over the weekend, news agency Xinhua reported.
