KUNMING, China (AP) — Emergency crews have not found any survivors as search continued Tuesday throughout the vast area where an Eastern China plane with 132 people on board crashed the day before in a mountainous region of southern China, in the country's worst air disaster in a decade.
“Wreckage of the aircraft was found at the scene, but so far none of the people traveling on the plane with which contact was lost have been found,” state television station CCTV reported Tuesday morning, more than 18 hours after the incident.
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 crash left a hole on the side of the mountain, rescuers pointed to Xinhua news agency. According to the report, drones and ground personnel would be used to try to locate the black boxes, which contain flight information and cockpit recordings that are essential in accident investigations.
China Eastern Flight 5735 was traveling at 455 knots (842 km/h, 523 mph) and about 29,000 feet high when it began a dizzying descent around 2:20 in the afternoon, according to data from 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.
The aircraft carried 123 passengers and nine crew members, reported the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration. The fall occurred approximately one hour after takeoff and close to the point where the plane would begin its descent into Guangzhou.
Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a “total commitment” to rescue operations, as well as an investigation into the crash and ensure absolute safety in civil aviation.
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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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