One of two flight recorders has been retrieved from the crashed China Eastern plane. (CGTN)
NANNING – Some human remains and parts of the wreckage of the China Eastern Airlines passenger plane that crashed into a mountain in Guangxi on Monday have been recovered at the crash site, an official told a press briefing on Wednesday.
The wreckage and human remains have been handed over to the investigation team, said Zheng Xi, head of the fire brigade of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, adding that rescuers from the brigade had covered a search area of 46,000 square meters by 7 pm Wednesday.
One of the two black boxes of the plane, believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, has also been recovered.
An official said the weather was normal and there were no hazardous weather conditions when the plane crashed
The exterior of the black box has been severely damaged, but its data storage unit is relatively complete, said Zhu Tao, head of the aviation safety office of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. The black box is being sent to Beijing for decoding.
The plane carrying 132 people crashed on Monday in Tengxian county in the city of Wuzhou, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. No survivors have been found so far.
Downloading and decoding the data will take some time, and the process could be prolonged further if the internal storage unit is impaired, Zhu said.
The official said that investigators will continue to search for the flight data recorder, the other black box, to provide a more complete picture of what happened to cause the crash.
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One of two flight recorders has been retrieved from the crashed China Eastern plane. (CGTN)
Mao Yanfeng, head of the aviation accident investigation center of CAAC, said earlier on Wednesday that the weather was normal and there were no hazardous weather conditions when the plane crashed.
All three pilots had flight licenses and health certificates within the validity period, with good health and complete flight experience, said Sun Shiying, chairman of the Yunnan branch of China Eastern Airlines
According to the air/ground communication records between the aircrew and air traffic controllers, they had maintained normal communication since the plane took off from Kunming until it suddenly dropped altitude en route to its destination, said Mao.
The Boeing 737 aircraft was delivered to China Eastern Airlines on June 22, 2015. Before its take-off on Monday, it met maintenance release standards and airworthiness requirements, Sun Shiying, chairman of the Yunnan branch of China Eastern Airlines, told the news briefing.
In terms of the flight crew, there was one captain and two co-pilots. All three pilots had flight licenses and health certificates within the validity period, with good health and complete flight experience, Sun said.
"From what we know at present, their families were in harmony," said Sun.
About 20 civil aviation technical experts on Wednesday arrived at the site of the crash to carry out an investigation into the tragedy. Rains have complicated the rescue and search efforts.
Photo taken with a mobile phone shows rescuers searching for the black boxes at a plane crash site in Tengxian county, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, March 22, 2022. (PHOTO/XINHUA)
"We'll conduct the on-site investigation today to calculate the distribution of the wreckage, possibly expanding the investigation area based on the aircraft's trajectory," said one of the experts.
"As the site may have to be excavated soon, we'll try to complete as much of the investigation as possible today," the expert added.
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Affected by continuous rainfall, the site that covers an area of 20,000 square meters is slippery and muddy, hindering search and rescue work.
A road leading to the core site of the accident has been built and weaved bamboo has been laid along the road to reduce the impact of the rain.