A plane of China Eastern Airlines with 132 passengers on board crashed on Monday in southwestern China, said the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC), without offering a casualty balance for the time being.
The Boeing 737 flew from the city of Kunming to the metropolis of Guangzhou, but “lost contact when it was flying over the city of Wuzhou,” in the Guangxi mountain region, according to a CAAC statement.
“At this time, it is confirmed that the flight has crashed,” said the CAAC, adding that it had activated its emergency response and that it had sent a rescue team to the scene.
The aircraft carried 123 passengers and 9 crew members, a total of 132 people, although previously the Chinese media had mentioned 133 people on board.
The Boeing 737 would have crashed in a rural area near that city, and “set a fire,” said a reporter on Chinese CCTV television, citing the local emergency coordination office.
- “Completely destroyed” -
A local resident told a local news website that the plane involved in the crash had been “completely destroyed” and that he had seen nearby forest areas destroyed by the fire caused by the apparatus crashing into the mountainside.
Fears arose on Monday afternoon when local media reported that China Eastern Flight MU5735 had not arrived as planned to Guangzhou after taking off from Kunming shortly after 13H00 (05H00 GMT).
The airline China Eastern, consulted by AFP, has not yet issued any comments on this matter, although on Monday afternoon, it had changed the colors of its website to black and white.
“The exact location of the accident was Langnan Township in Teng County,” a local official told AFP, without giving any further details.
The flight tracker FlightRadar24 did not offer more data for flight MU5735 after 14H22 local, when it arrived in Wuzhou. The web shows how the plane had dropped sharply from an altitude of 29,100 feet to 3,225 feet in the span of three minutes, before the flight information stopped.
In recent years, China has maintained good standards of air safety, in a country full of newly built airports and covered by new airlines established to meet the country's skyrocketing growth in recent decades.
The last major plane crash in China was in August 2010, with an unconfirmed toll of 42 victims.
It was the last accident on a Chinese commercial passenger flight that caused civilian casualties.
The deadliest Chinese commercial flight accident was a 1994 China Northwest Airlines accident in which all 160 people on board died.
The majority of passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared in March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, were from China.
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