21.03.2023
One year ago today, China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 suddenly descended rapidly from a high altitude 64 minutes after taking off from Kunming, and crashed in a valley in Guangxi, killing all crew members. The Civil Aviation Administration of China issued a notice on the eve of the anniversary of the accident, saying that the accident was “very complicated and extremely rare” and that the investigation needs to be further in-depth.
(Deutsche Welle Chinese website) On the occasion of the first anniversary of the crash of China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735, the Civil Aviation Administration of China issued the “Notice on the Progress of the Investigation of the “March 21″ Eastern Airlines MU5735 Aircraft Accident”. The March 20 notice said the investigation was ongoing because the accident was “very complex and extremely rare.”
On March 21, 2022, a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 passenger plane, while flying MU5735 from Kunming Changshui Airport to Guangzhou Baiyun Airport, quickly descended from an altitude of 8,900 meters 64 minutes after takeoff and crashed in Near Molong Village, Yannan Town, Teng County, Wuzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The plane disintegrated after hitting the ground, killing all 123 passengers and nine crew members on board.
The Associated Press pointed out that since the fatal accidents in the Chinese aviation industry in the 1990s, its overall flight safety has been greatly improved.The airliner crash a year ago was a rare failure。
The Civil Aviation Administration of China emphasized in the notice issued on Monday that in the one year after the accident, the technical investigation team carried out a lot of work such as on-site investigation, data inspection, personnel interviews, and experimental analysis, but did not disclose the specific investigation. Discover. The report also stated that the technical investigation team will continue to carry out work such as cause analysis and experimental verification on the basis of the previous work, and will release relevant information in a timely manner according to the progress of the investigation.
The crew of the downed airliner did not report any problems before losing contact with air controllers.A month after the crash, the Civil Aviation Administration of China had saiddid not find any abnormalities in the technical condition of the aircraft itself, the crew or external factors such as the weather.
The ‘black box’ that recorded the flight data of the crashed airliner was handed over to the US National Transportation Safety Board for analysis. No information has been released so far on the progress of the investigation.
Why “very complex and extremely rare”?
The crashed passenger plane was a Boeing 737-800 passenger plane, introduced by China Eastern Airlines in 2015. Before the crash, the total number of flights was close to 9,000 and the flight time was more than 18,000 hours. When the plane crashed, it crashed into a valley near Molong Village, Yannan Town, Tengxian County, Wuzhou City, Guangxi, causing a depression about 20 meters deep on the mountainside and causing a nearby forest to catch fire.
China Eastern airliner crashes, sparks forest fire
The Civil Aviation Administration later reported that more than 49,000 pieces of the wreckage had been repaired. The impact of the crash was so violent that the “black box” was finally found 1.5 meters underground.
Shao Quan, deputy dean of the School of Civil Aviation, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told the official Xinhua News Agency that the investigation cycle of large-scale transport aviation accidents often exceeds one year. This is mainly due to the technical complexity and uncertainty faced by the investigation. Many technical doubts All difficult points need to be demonstrated repeatedly, and some key conclusions need to be verified and supported by engineering experiments, which will consume a lot of time.
However, Greg Waldron, editor-in-chief of the Asia department of FlightGlobal, an aerospace professional information platform, told Reuters that the brevity of the bulletin issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China a year after the crash was somewhat unusual. He believes that the reports issued by other Asian countries, usually a year after the accident, are tens or even hundreds of pages long and contain detailed analysis.
“The purpose of this is not to hold people accountable, but to improve safety standards across the industry,” he said.
While the China Eastern Airlines MU5735 crash, like all other air tragedies, is complex, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorderBoth black boxes were recovered days after the accident. “Data from these devices should provide a detailed understanding of the exact conditions of the aircraft and cockpit at the time of the crash.”
The notice issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China on Monday also aroused many doubts among the public. Some netizens commented on the official notification that “it’s like saying nothing”; some people sarcastically said that even when both black boxes were found and the wreckage of the plane was on the ground, the one-year investigation still didn’t even have a preliminary conclusion. is “extremely rare”.
China Eastern Airlines, one of China’s four major state-run civil airlines, temporarily grounded all of its more than 200 Boeing 737-800s after the crash, though they have since reinstated them. China Eastern Airlines said that this measure is only for preventive purposes and does not mean that there is a problem with this type of aircraft.
The Boeing 737-800 is one of the most widely used airliner models in the world.
(Associated Press, Reuters, etc.)
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