China finds black box two days after Eastern plane crash
One of the two "black box" recorders from the crashed China Eastern airliner was recovered as investigators try to piece together what made a jet carrying 132 passengers nosedive in southern China.
Recovering the so-called black boxes, which are usually painted orange for visibility, is considered key to figuring out the cause of a plane crash.
One of the two “black box” recorders from the crashed China Eastern flight has been found in severely damaged condition, two days after the accident that presumably killed all 132 people on board.
The device is so damaged that investigators were not able to tell whether it is the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder, said Mao Yanfeng, the director of the accident investigation division of the Civil Aviation Authority of China (CAAC), on Wednesday.
The flight data recorder captures information about the plane’s airspeed, altitude, direction up or down, pilot actions, and performance of all key systems.
The cockpit voice recorder, on the other hand, captures sounds including conversations and background engine noise during the flight.
Yanfeng told a news conference that an all-out effort is being made to find the other black box. It wasn't clear if the damage to the recovered one would limit its usefulness.
Investigators say it is too early to speculate on the cause. The plane went into an unexplained dive an hour after departure and stopped transmitting data 96 seconds into the fall.
Search for clues continues
China Eastern Flight 5735, a Boeing 737-800 plane, was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew from Kunming in Yunnan province to Guangzhou, an industrial centre on China’s southeastern coast.
It crashed into a mountain on Monday afternoon outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region of southern China. There have not been any reports of survivors.
An air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply, but got no reply, Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the CAAC, had said on Tuesday.
The search for clues into why the Chinese commercial jetliner suddenly dove and crashed had been suspended earlier due to rain.
Searchers had been using hand tools, drones and sniffer dogs under rainy conditions to comb the heavily forested slopes for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, as well as any human remains.
Crews also worked to pump water from the pit created when the plane hit the ground, but their efforts were suspended around midmorning because small landslides were possible on the steep, slick slopes.
READ MORE: No survivors found in wreckage of China Eastern plane crash
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