Boeing 737 plane crashes in China’s Guangxi, 132 aboard

Videos published by the official People’s Daily showed thick smoke above a forest and a charred clearing, with pieces of the plane scattered on ground.

State broadcaster CCTV said the number of casualties was still unknown.

The plane, flight MU5735, was operated by China Eastern Airlines, flying from Kunming to Guangzhou and was meant to arrive around 3 p.m.

Beijing Youth Daily, citing an official in Teng county’s emergency response bureau said teams of firefighters and other emergency personnel had been dispatched. “Basically we have sent all the forces that we can send,” the official said, according to the paper.

If all passengers on board are confirmed dead, the crash will be China’s deadliest since 1994 when a China Northwest Airlines flight — a Soviet-built Tupolev-154 — crashed in Xian, killing 160 people after the plane broke up in the air because of an autopilot malfunction.

In 1992, a China Southern flight flying between Guangzhou and Guilin crashed while landing, killing all 144 passengers on board.

The country’s last major plane crash was in 2010, when a Henan Airlines’ ERJ-190 regional jet, built by Embraer, overshot the runway on landing in Yichun in Heilongjiang province, and burst into flames, killing 44. The pilot was sentenced to three years in jail on charges of negligence.

The plane in Monday’s crash was a Boeing 737-800 model, one of the most common passenger planes in the world and almost seven years old, according to FlightAware.

It was not the 737 Max series, which was grounded after being implicated in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019 and only recently returned to service in China.