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Zhao Ziwen

The cause of China’s worst plane crash in 28 years remains a mystery after the country’s civil aviation regulator issued a report on Monday – a year after the catastrophe – that stopped short of suggesting a reason for the disaster.
While the report said the probe would continue, no time limit on the investigation is required, according to the agency’s regulations.
China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 – a Boeing 737-800 – crashed into a hillside near Wuzhou, a city in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on March 21, 2022, killing all 123 passengers and nine crew members.
The airliner had been flying from Kunming in Yunan province to the southern city of Guangzhou.
It was the biggest aeroplane disaster in China in 28 years.
“Due to the complexity and extreme rarity of this accident, the in-depth investigation is continuing,” the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said in the statement.
“Subsequently, the technical investigation team will continue to carry out cause analysis and experimental verification based on the previous work, and release relevant information according to the progress of the investigation,” it added.
The report came 10 months after the CAAC denied a report by the Wall Street Journal that the crash may have been intentional, perhaps caused by someone in the cockpit who pushed the aircraft into a dive. The report quoted unidentified sources in the US.
The CAAC said at the time that “no information about the investigation has been released to any media”.
“China Eastern Airlines must give us a clear explanation,” said a man surnamed Ouyang, an uncle of an 18-year-old university student from Guangzhou who died in the crash, who spoke with the Post last May.
‘If true it’s so terrible’: shock over report claiming MU5735 dived deliberately
The investigation is being led by the CAAC, which invited Boeing – the US manufacturer of the aircraft – and the National Transportation Safety Board, a US government agency responsible for overseeing aircraft makers.
Neither of the investigation groups have issued statements.
Guo Quan, deputy director of the College of Civil Aviation at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said that large-scale aviation accident investigations usually take longer because of their complexity.
“[Such] investigations are often more than a year … many technical issues require repeated tests, and key conclusions also need to be verified by engineering experiments,” he said in an interview with China’s Xinhua.
“Only 25 per cent of commercial aviation accidents have had a final report issued within a year out of more than 1,000 civil aviation accidents around the world over the past 30 years,” Guo Said.
China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735: second black box sent for decoding
The statement from the aviation department followed several changes made in December to the agency’s regulations on aviation investigations.
The revisions include a new mandatory requirement that all accident investigations must issue a report within 12 months of the accident.
“If the accident investigation report cannot be submitted on time, a report on the progress of the investigation shall be submitted to the related department.”
Under those circumstances, however, the changes mean that after an inconclusive progress report has been submitted, there will be no further time limit for the investigation.


According to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, a copy of the CAAC investigation final report should be submitted to the United Nations body.
The convention also requires that investigators publish an interim statement each year after the accident until the probe is concluded. Under the CAAC’s regulation, such a report is only required in the first year.
The US National Transportation Safety Board said it was supporting the Chinese investigation in line with international rules that state only the country leading the investigation will release information about it.
“As such, all information will be released by the lead investigative authority, which in this case is the CAAC,” a spokeswoman for the board added.
Experts have said that the aircraft had been flying in low-risk conditions, and there did not appear to have been any sudden adverse weather or problems with the aircraft itself.
China Eastern Airlines said that the pilots’ health and family conditions were good, with no apparent financial problems.


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New report from China’s aviation regulator reveals little detail, says probe is continuing
Flight MU5735 slammed into hillside in Guangxi region killing all 132 on board


A new report from China’s aviation regulator reveals little detail, says probe is continuing.


China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 crash

Aviation

Plane crashes and aviation accidents

A year after China Eastern plane disaster, few clues, fewer answers

New report from China’s aviation regulator reveals little detail, says probe is continuing Flight MU5735 slammed into hillside in Guangxi region killing all 132 on board

New report from China’s aviation regulator reveals little detail, says probe is continuing

Flight MU5735 slammed into hillside in Guangxi region killing all 132 on board