New Delhi: US investigators believe someone in the cockpit deliberately crashed a China Eastern flight that suddenly plunged to the ground in southern China in March, the US media reported.
The Boeing 737-800 was on its way from Kunming to Guangzhou on March 21 when it dropped from its cruising altitude of 29,000 feet into a mountainside, killing all 132 people on board. It was mainland China’s worst aviation disaster in nearly 30 years.
The flight data recorders recovered from the crash site were sent to the United States for analysis and show that someone – possibly a pilot or someone who had forced their way into the cockpit – input orders to send the aircraft into a nosedive.
“The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” a person familiar with the preliminary assessment by experts on the US National Transportation Safety Board told the media.
The pilots did not respond to repeated calls from air traffic controllers and nearby planes during the rapid descent, authorities have said.
The airline said it wasn’t responsible for the accident investigation and referred to official announcements, including the Chinese government’s summary of its preliminary report released on April 20. The summary said that data restoration and analysis of the damaged black boxes were still in progress.
According to China Eastern, the pilot and co-pilot had both been in good health and had no known financial or family issues. Chinese authorities said that no emergency code had been sent from the plane, suggesting the cockpit security was unlikely to have been breached.
(Smit Soni)