Mud-stained wallets. Bank cards. Official identity cards.
Poignant reminders of 132 lives presumed lost were lined up by rescue workers scouring a remote Chinese mountainside yesterday after a China Eastern flight inexplicably fell from the sky a day earlier and burst into a huge fireball.
A piece of wreckage of China Eastern flight MU5735.Credit:Xinhua via AP
No survivors have been found among the 123 passengers and nine crew members. Video clips posted by China’s state media show small pieces of the Boeing 737-800 plane scattered over a wide forested area, some in green fields, others in burnt-out patches with raw earth exposed after fires burned in the trees.
Search teams have been working through the night using their hands, picks, sniffer dogs and other equipment to look for survivors, according to China’s state broadcaster CCTV.
The steep, rough terrain and the huge size of the debris field are complicating the search for the black box, which holds the flight data and cockpit voice recorder.
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As family members gathered at the destination and departure airports, what caused the plane to drop out of the sky shortly before it would have begun its descent to the southern China metropolis of Guangzhou remained a mystery.
At an evening news conference, a grim-faced Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said efforts were focused on finding the black box and that it was too early to speculate on a possible cause of the crash.
“As of now, the rescue has yet to find survivors,” Zhu said. “The public security department has taken control of the site.”
Zhu said an air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply, but got no reply.
AP
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