Two years after air disaster, Chinese investigators offer no clues as to why jet nosedived

By Nectar Gan, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN) — Two years after a Boeing 737-800 passenger jet nosedived 29,000 feet into a remote mountain, killing all 132 people on board, investigators in China have failed to offer new insight into the cause of the country’s deadliest air disaster in decades.

In an update of its probe released Wednesday ahead of the crash anniversary, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) did not address the crucial question of what had prompted China Eastern flight 5735 to nosedive, nor did it mention data from the plane’s black boxes that would offer key clues to explain what happened.

Instead, its statement merely reiterated earlier findings that it found no problems with the aircraft, crew or weather conditions before the flight departed the southwestern city of Kunming for Guangzhou on March 21, 2022.

The update failed to quell speculation in China about what caused the fatal crash, with some asking why investigators had not disclosed information from the black boxes.

Black boxes record all relevant flight data, as well as conversations in the cockpit, which are used by investigators to reconstruct the events leading to an aircraft incident.

In a summary of its preliminary report released in April 2022, the CAAC said the two black boxes of the crashed China Eastern jet were “severely damaged” and “the data restoration and analysis work is still in progress.”

But sophisticated laboratories like those run by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and its counterparts in France, Australia and the United Kingdom, can reconstruct even broken memory cards and then line up the data with audio feeds into the cockpit voice recorder.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2022 that black box data recovered from the flight and sent to the US NTSB for analysis suggests someone in the cockpit intentionally downed the plane, citing a preliminary assessment from United States officials.

“The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” the Journal quoted a person who is familiar with American officials’ preliminary assessment as saying.

The CAAC has previously denied the crash was caused intentionally.

“These rumors…have seriously misled the public and interfered with the investigation of the accident,” Wu Shijie, a CAAC official, told a news conference in April 2022.

In its update Wednesday, the CAAC said no faults or abnormalities were found in the aircraft’s systems, structures or engines before take-off.

The flight and cabin crew held valid licenses, and the crew had enough rest and passed health checks on the day of the flight; the support staff and facilities at the departure airport were fine, so were air control personnel and communication, navigation and monitoring systems, it said.

Before the crash, there were no abnormalities in radio communications and control commands, or any reports of dangerous weather in the airspace of the plane or along its route, according to the CAAC.

There was also no evidence to suggest the plane was carrying dangerous items in cargo or passengers’ luggage, it added.

“In the follow-up, the technical investigation team will continue to carry out experimental verification and cause analysis, and release relevant information in a timely manner based on the progress of the investigation,” the statement said, suggesting the investigation will continue into a third year.

The statement was met with strong criticism on Chinese social media.

“If everything is normal, it means that it is either done intentionally by someone on board, or caused by sudden force majeure!” said a top comment on social platform Weibo with nearly 28,000 upvotes.

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