GUANGZHOU, China (AP) — Wallets stained with mud. Bank cards. Official IDs. Some of the personal effects of the 132 people presumed dead were placed by rescuers searching a mountain on Tuesday, among the wreckage of an Eastern China plane that fell from the sky the day before and burst into a huge fireball.
No survivors of the 123 passengers and nine crew members have been found. Videos shared by Chinese state media showed small fragments of the plane scattered across a large area of forest, some in green fields, others in burnt areas where fire devoured trees. Each fragment has a number next to it, the largest ones with police tape.
As relatives gathered at the airports of departure and destination of the flight, it was still a mystery what caused the Boeing 737-800 to fall from the sky shortly before it began its planned descent into the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou. The search for the black boxes, which contain the flight data and the cockpit voice recorder essential to investigate the event, would be difficult, Xinhua news agency said, and would require drones and manual search.
The shock left a deep crater on the hillside, rescuers pointed to Xinhua news agency. Chen Weihao, who saw the plane crash while working on a farm, told the news agency that he had fallen into an uninhabited area of the mountain.
“The plane seemed to be in one piece when it fell. Within seconds, it crashed,” Chen said.
Rescuers built a base of operations near the site with vehicles, ambulances and a truck with a generator parked in the small space. Soldiers dressed in camouflage joined the rescuers in orange jumpers and helmets to search the burned place and among the dense vegetation of the area.
Security was reinforced at the entrance to Molang, a village close to the site. Police officers were seen checking every vehicle that arrived in the village.
The steep slope of the hillside made it difficult to place fish equipment, although it did not seem to be very necessary because there were hardly any large pieces left of the fuselage.
The Boeing 737-800 crashed near the city of Wuzhou, in the Guangxi region, while flying from Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, towards Guangzhou, an industrial center on the east coast. The crash triggered a fire large enough to be captured on NASA satellite images.
The family members of the passengers met at the two airports. In a rest area in the basement of Kunmig Airport, people were seen wrapped in pink blankets and sitting in massage chairs. Airport workers carried food bags and mats. A security guard blocked an AP journalist and said that “interviews are not accepted.”
In Guangzhou, relatives were escorted to a staffed reception center equipped with full protective suits to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus.
China's first fatal plane crash in more than a decade dominated the country's news and social media. Foreign leaders such as Britain's Boris Johnson, India's Narendra Modi and Canadian Justin Trudeau expressed their condolences on Twitter.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in a message to his employees that the company was appalled by the news and had offered the full support of its technical staff to assist in the investigation.
China Eastern Flight 5735 was traveling at an altitude of about 29,000 feet when it began a dizzying descent around 2:20 in the afternoon, according to data from the flight-tracking site FlightRadar24.com. The aircraft collapsed to about 7,400 feet before recovering about 1,200 feet of altitude and collapsed again. It stopped transmitting information 96 seconds after its downfall began.
China Eastern took all its 737-800 models out of service, according to the Chinese Ministry of Transport. Aviation experts pointed out that it is unusual to land an entire fleet of aircraft if there is no evidence of a problem with the model.
The decision that could further disrupt domestic air traffic in China, already affected by the largest coronavirus outbreak in the country since the first in early 2020.
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Associated Press researcher Yu Bing and news assistant Caroline Chen and journalist Ken Moritsogu, in Beijing; and researcher Si Chen, in Shanghai; contributed to this office.
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