China has retrieved the second black box from a crashed jet after days of searching, as investigators try to work out why the China Eastern Airlines flight carrying 132 people plummeted from a cruise altitude.
The flight data recorder was found 5 feet beneath the soil at 9:20 a.m. on Sunday, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Investigators made the discovery on the east hillside of the crash site in rural southern China near the city of Wuzhou, it added.
The black box was sent to Beijing for analysis, CCTV reported. Some parts of the device were severely damaged, Zhu Tao, an official at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said at a news conference on Sunday in Wuzhou, without giving more details. Officials said the box was found some 40 meters from the main crash site, and was among the more than 33,700 pieces of wreckage recovered.
Investigators found the Boeing Co. 737-800 NG’s cockpit voice recorder on Wednesday and aim to use data from the two boxes to understand what went wrong on the flight. There are concerns, however, about the condition of the devices, given the plane appears to have plunged into the ground at high speed on March 21. Officials haven’t ruled out the possibility the first black box was badly damaged upon impact.
Flight MU5735 from Kunming was cruising at about 29,000 feet and some 100 miles from its destination in Guangzhou, southern China, when it suddenly went into a steep descent. Over the next 1 minute and 35 seconds the plane lost altitude in a near vertical dive, which took it almost to the speed of sound.
The plane briefly halted its descent for some 10 seconds, and climbed a little, before plummeting again and slamming into a hillside. All 132 people on board, including nine crew members, were killed.
Liu Xiaodong, a spokesman for China Eastern, said at the Sunday briefing that the airline had started discussing compensation with relatives of the crash victims, “and will fully respect the reasonable demands of the family in accordance with relevant laws and regulations of the state.”
China said Saturday it hadn’t found any evidence of explosive materials in the wreckage of the plane. They added that the remains of 120 people had been identified.
