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Horrifying footage has captured the apparent moment a China Eastern Boeing 737 that was carrying 132 people fell from the sky and erupted into flames in southern China on Monday.
The video — shared by local media — showed the plane nosediving towards the ground near the city of Wuzhou in the southern province of Guangxi in what Chinese officials say is the country’s worst air disaster in nearly a decade.
The plane had been cruising at about 30,000 feet just moments before it suddenly started plunging vertically and crashed into remote mountains, sparking a blaze big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images, officials said.
Separate footage showed heavy smoke and flames billowing from the crash site in the aftermath. Villagers also found debris from the plane scattered in the region, local media reported.
There was no immediate word on the number of dead and injured.
The People’s Daily cited a rescue official as saying Flight 5735 had disintegrated upon crashing and there was no sign of life among the debris.
The flight, which had been carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members, crashed at about 2:30 p.m. local time, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said.
The flight had taken off from the city of Kunming just after 1 p.m. and was en route to Guangzhou.
Contact with the plane was lost at about 2:15 p.m. local time, the Guangxi provincial emergency management department said.
Data from flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.com suggests the plane crashed within a minute and a half.
China Eastern said the cause of the crash was under investigation and the airline has set up a hotline for relatives of those on board.
The airline has since changed its website color to black and white, which airlines do in response to a crash as a sign of respect for the assumed victims.
The plane that crashed was a 6-year-old 737-800 aircraft, according to Flightradar24.
All 737-800s in China Eastern’s fleet have been grounded in the wake of the crash, state media reported.
The 737-800 model has a good safety record and is the predecessor to the 737 MAX model that has been grounded in China for more than three years following fatal crashes in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia.
The deadliest crash involving a Boeing 737-800 was in January 2020 when Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard accidentally shot down a Ukraine International Airlines flight, killing all 176 people on board.
China’s last deadly crash of a civilian jetliner was in 2010.
With Post wires
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