The crash with the Chinese airline China Eastern on March 21 may have been intentional. This would appear from the flight data on the black boxes, reports The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, citing US sources involved in the investigation.
The airline’s Boeing 737-800 was en route from Kunming to Guangzhou on March 21 when it abruptly descended at cruising altitude and crashed into the countryside near Wuzhou, a city in the Guangxi region. In the last few minutes, the aircraft lost more than 9 kilometers in altitude, data from FlightRadar24† All 132 people on board were killed.
It is unusual for an aircraft to crash during cruise flight, because the autopilot is almost always activated. According to sources from The Wall Street Journal the flight data indicates that someone in the cockpit deliberately plunged the aircraft into a nosedive.
The so-called black boxes, which contain all flight data and record conversations in the cockpit, are currently being investigated in the United States. According to the American newspaper, that investigation will now focus on the role of the pilots. Still, it cannot be ruled out that someone else on the plane may have entered the cockpit, the sources say.
China Eastern calls the scenario that someone else entered the cockpit “unlikely”. It refers to a statement from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) regulator, which stated that the pilots had not sent out a distress signal.
Pilots had a good reputation
CAAC previously reported that the pilots were qualified to fly and in good standing. They also had no financial or health problems. On April 20, CAAC reported in a preliminary investigation that the aircraft had been well maintained and that the weather at the time of the crash was also good. The supervisor could not be reached for comment.
The crashed Boeing was taken into service in June 2015 by China Eastern, an airline with a good reputation for safety. China Eastern grounded its more than 200 Boeing 737-800 aircraft after the crash. A month later the airline flew again for the first time with the device.
Aviation experts have previously said to The Guardian that it is possible that China Eastern’s plane crashed on purpose. This is how the flight and the crash show similarities with that of the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 on March 24, 2015.
On that flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, the copilot deliberately crashed the aircraft in the Alps. The copilot, 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, was found to have mental health problems. As with the China Eastern flight, no distress signal was issued on that flight before the dive.
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