FILE – Residents watch as a China Eastern passenger plane prepares to take off on a test flight from the new Beijing Daxing International Airport on Monday, May 13, 2019. State media reported one machine. China Eastern passenger plane with 133 people on board crashed. southern Guangxi province on Monday.
Ng Han Guan / AP
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Ng Han Guan / AP
FILE – Residents watch as a China Eastern passenger plane prepares to take off on a test flight from the new Beijing Daxing International Airport on Monday, May 13, 2019. State media reported one machine. China Eastern passenger plane with 133 people on board crashed. southern Guangxi province on Monday.
Ng Han Guan / AP
BEIJING – A Chinese plane has crashed in rural southern China with 132 people on board in the country’s worst air disaster in two decades.
The Boeing 737 is operated by China Eastern Airlines, a state-owned company and one of China’s largest airlines.
Eyewitness videos from the crash site showed debris – including what looked like bands of the plane’s metal shell – scattered across a mountainside in Guangxi’s Teng district. Other videos show a large fire raging in the area where the crash occurred. Authorities say they are battling a “volcano” and emergency workers have been dispatched to help.
Authorities have yet to determine the total number of casualties or why the plane crashed.
This could be the Chinese airline’s worst air disaster since 2002, when an Air China flight took off from Beijing and crashed in Busan, South Korea, killing 129 people on board. network.
Flight tracking radar showed it departed on schedule from the Chinese city of Kunming and was en route to Guangzhou further east. However, the air control towers lost contact with the plane as it flew over Guangxi province.
China has had frequent fatal plane crashes, but strict safety guidelines, coupled with a new fleet of planes and airports, have made crashes a rarity over the past two decades.
The last civilian plane crash over mainland China occurred on August 24, 2010, when a plane crashed in the city of Yichun, northeastern China, killing 44 of the 96 people on board. .
Aowen Cao contributed research from Beijing.
