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Your support makes all the difference.India has decided to put three airline carriers that have Boeing 737 fleets under “enhanced surveillance” following a plane crash in southern China with 132 people on board.
The Indian carriers include SpiceJet, Vistara and Air India Express.
“Flight safety is serious business and we are closely studying the situation,” said Arun Kumar, the chief of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in India. “In the interim, we are focusing on enhanced surveillance of our 737 fleets.”
On Monday, a China Eastern Airlines’ Boeing 737-800 flight, which was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou, crashed on a wooded mountainside in the country’s worst air disaster in more than a decade.
Smoke could be seen rising from hills near the city of Wuzhou, in Teng county, in the province of Guangxi, after the Boeing 737-800 plummeted 30,000ft in less than three minutes. State broadcaster CCTV reported on Tuesday morning that no survivors had been found.
Rescue teams have continued to scour the slopes of the mountain in hopes of finding the black box and other parts of the plane that could help experts determine the exact cause of the crash.
On Tuesday, China witnessed mass cancellations as 74 per cent of the 11,800 flights that were scheduled were scrapped.
China Eastern Airlines has also grounded its entire fleet of Boeing 737-800s.
Meanwhile, Boeing issued a statement soon after the crash on Monday expressing condolences. The statement added that the aircraft manufacturer was “in contact with the US National Transportation Safety Board and our technical experts are prepared to assist with the investigation led by the Civil Aviation Administration of China”.
The share price of China Eastern Airlines fell by more than 6 per cent in Shanghai on Tuesday.
Experts are predicting that passengers might be wary of flying on a Boeing 737 in the wake of the crash.
Cai von Rumohr, an analyst at investment bank Cowen told BBC News: “Given Boeing’s problems with the 737 MAX, there is some chance that consumers may not want to fly on a 737 until the cause of the China Eastern crash is determined not to be a design or manufacturing issue.”
According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, there are 4,208 Boeing 737-800 passenger planes in service, with over a quarter of them based in China.
The Boeing 737-800 has an excellent safety record and has been deployed around the world since the 1990s, part of the Next Generation era. It preceded the 737 Max, which was grounded globally after two deadly crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
The plane crash has confused independent experts, who are at a loss to explain how the aircraft suddenly nosedived to the ground.
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