China Plane Crash: All 132 on Board Boeing 737-800 Feared Dead

A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board went into a near-vertical dive and crashed in a remote mountainous area of of Guangxi province in southern China on Monday. All 123 passengers and 9 crew of flight MU5735 are feared dead. It was the country’s worst air disaster in nearly a decade.

Search and rescue operations continued on Tuesday morning. The crash set off a forest fire visible from space in the country's worst air disaster in nearly a decade. State broadcaster CCTV reported it was later put out.

More than 18 hours after communication was lost with the plane, there was still no word about the fate of passengers and crew members, leaving families waiting to learn whether anyone survived.

Video from CCTV showed military personnel, firefighters and search and rescue teams scouring the wooded mountainous area where the crash took place.

A small broken plane fragment could be seen in the footage.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said the crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region.

The plane was flying from Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan to the industrial center of Guangzhou along the east coast.

China Eastern Flight MU5735 was traveling 455 knots (523 mph, 842 kph) at around 29,000 feet when it entered a steep and fast dive around 2:20 p.m. local time, according to data from flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.com.

The plane plunged to 7,400 feet before briefly regaining about 1,200 feet in altitude, then descended sharply again. The plane stopped transmitting data 96 seconds after starting to fall.

Local villagers were first to arrive at the forested area where the plane went down and sparked a blaze big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images.

Hundreds of rescue workers were swiftly dispatched from Guangxi and neighboring Guangdong province.

It was about an hour into the flight, and nearing the point at which it would begin descending into Guangzhou, when it pitched downward.

CCTV said China Eastern set up nine teams to deal with aircraft disposal, accident investigation, family assistance and other pressing matters.

The CAAC and China Eastern both said they had sent officials to the crash site in accordance with emergency measures.

At this juncture it’s too early to predict what caused the crash. Possibilities range from an equipment malfunction, to a weather-related event, to pilot illness or suicide, to a terrorist attack of some description. Nothing has been ruled out.

The primary focus will be on scouring the wreckage to finding the plane’s so-called black boxes — the flight data and cockpit recorders, which should provide the biggest clues as to the cause of the nosedive. One particular detail of note is that the aircraft’s dive appeared to have halted for about 10 seconds and it climbed briefly at about 8,000 feet before resuming its descent, according to data from Flightradar24.

The airline announced that it would ground all its Boeing 737-800 jets from Tuesday, and expressed condolences to passengers and crew on board. Boeing said in a message to all employees it was “deeply saddened” by the crash and had been in “close communication with customer and regulatory authorities since the accident.”

China’s Vice Premier Liu He has been tasked with overseeing the investigation, which will be carried out by the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Authorities will work alongside a senior investigator from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and representatives from Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.