BEIJING (AP) – One month after a China Eastern passenger jet crashed mid-flight, killing all 132 people on board, investigators said they have not determined a cause.
A report issued yesterday by the Civil Aviation Administration of China said no abnormalities had been found in the plane, its crew or external elements such as bad weather.
The report said investigators are still attempting to extract data from the heavily damaged black box flight data and voice recorders that might offer insight into the plane’s condition and the crew’s actions in the final minutes of the flight.
The United States (US) National Transportation Safety Board is helping download information from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. Both black boxes are being analysed by US experts at a government lab in Washington, DC.
The China Eastern Boeing 737-800 went into a sudden nosedive, appeared to briefly recover, and then slammed into the ground in a mountainous area on March 21. The crew made no report of problems before losing contact with air traffic control.
The crash left a 20-metre-deep crater in a 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 metres underground.
Flight MU5735 with 123 passengers and nine crew members was headed from the city of Kunming in southwestern China to Guangzhou, a provincial capital and export manufacturing hub near Hong Kong in the southeast.
In addition to analysing flight data, investigators will continue subjecting wreckage to scientific tests in search of clues, the report said.
