A China Eastern Airlines flight carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members plummeted over 30,000 feet into the mountains of Guangxi China on Monday.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China and China Central Television confirmed the crash, but said the number of casualties and the cause are still unknown.
Rescuers said that when arriving on the scene, fire and debris were the only remnants that could be found.
This video from China Aviation Review on Twitter reportedly shows pieces of debris from the crash.
Flight MU5735 was a domestic flight, leaving Kunming around 1:10 p.m. local time, and was expected to land in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong just after 3 p.m.
According to flight tracker Flightradar24, the plane was cruising at an altitude of nearly 30,000 feet when it dropped over 21,000 feet in one minute. It appeared to briefly regain altitude around 8,000 feet before continuing its drop into the remote region of Guangxi.
“Boeing is in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and our technical experts are prepared to assist with the investigation led by the Civil Aviation Administration of China,” Boeing said in a statement. They could not yet state the cause of the incident.
The plane was six years old, and Boeing 737-800s have a track record of being safe planes.
“I don’t think we should get all nervous about an incident such as this one just yet,” John Gradek, Faculty Lecturer and Academic Programs Coordinator of Aviation Management at McGill University, told Humber News.
It’s common for flights to drop so quickly when depressurization issues are present within an aircraft, he said.
The cabin crew would be prepared for an event like this to occur, and the flight would drop to re-pressurize the cabin. Issues that could cause this include a loss of compressors, mechanical issues, windows cracking, or doors not being closed properly, he said.
What was concerning about this flight was how, after the initial drop, the flight continued to descend and crashed two minutes later, Gradek said.
“This tells me there was something else wrong with the airplane.”
Gradek assured that this incident is very different from the Boeing crashes involving mechanical issues with Boeing’s 737 MAX model back in 2018 and 2019. The Lion Air flight in Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines flight crashes killed 346.
The last fatal flight crash in China happened over 10 years ago, when a Henan Airlines flight crashed and killed 44 people.