Boeing 737 plane crashes into mountains in China’s Guangxi region; 132 aboard

According to data from Flightradar24, the China Eastern Airlines flight was cruising at 29,100 feet when it began to lose altitude suddenly. Just over two minutes later, the plane had descended to 9,075 feet. According to Flightradar’s data, the last recorded altitude was 3,225 feet, which indicated a vertical descent of 31,000 feet per minute. The flight was in the air for 48 minutes, according to the site.

A man driving on an expressway by Wuzhou told Beijing Youth Daily that he saw the plane nosediving into the mountains at 2:23 p.m. “It fell almost vertically,” said the man identified only by his surname Li.

Video of the plane falling steeply toward the mountainside was captured by a local mining company and posted online and verified by The Paper, a Shanghai-based outlet. An employee of Beichen Mining told the outlet that the company had installed surveillance cameras on the mountain.

China Eastern Airlines confirmed the crash and said it was opening a hotline for the family members of those on board. The airline’s website and Weibo account logo was turned black and white in a sign of mourning.

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

A villager told state media that he had heard a “huge explosion” and rushed to the scene by motorcycle. After driving for three or four minutes around the area of the crash, he did not see any victims or their remains.

State broadcaster CCTV said the number of casualties was still unknown. The plane, China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou and was meant to arrive around 3 p.m.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a statement that he was “shocked” to learn of the accident, according to CCTV, which reported that he had given “important instructions” to fully activate emergency response operations and properly handle the aftermath of the accident and had ordered an investigation.

China Eastern shares on Hong Kong’s market fell 6.46 percent following news of the crash. Boeing shares were down more than 8 percent in pre-market trading in New York. In a statement, Boeing said it was aware of reports and “working to gather more information.”

Hundreds of firefighters and search and rescue teams were sent to the scene, according to local officials. Beijing Youth Daily, citing an official in Tengxian, a county of Wuzhou, said teams from surrounding areas had been dispatched. “Basically we have sent all the forces that we can send,” the official said, according to the paper.

The teams had reached the crash site but not yet identified the remains of any of the victims, according to Guangxi fire services.

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 Tu-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 Airlines flight 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.

China’s aviation safety record is among the best in the world after regulators reformed the industry following a string of plane crashes and hijackings in the 1990s, which earned the country a reputation of once being one of the most dangerous places in the world to fly.

The plane in Monday’s crash was a Boeing 737-800 model, one of the most common passenger planes in the world and just under 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.

Vic Chiang in Taipei and Lori Aratani in Washington contributed to this report.