China Eastern plane crash: Recovery workers find second black box, state media says

China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 crashed with 132 people on board

Recovery workers on Sunday found the second black box of China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 that crashed with 132 people on board, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

Search teams scouring the forest-clad mountains of Guangzhou region for a week now found an orange cylinder confirmed to be the second black box on a mountain slope about 1.5ms (5ft) underground, state broadcaster CCTV said.

The box, which contains crucial information about the flight’s movement, can help investigators find out what went wrong with MU5735 that crashed on Monday.

This comes after the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was recovered from the crash site on Wednesday and was sent to an institute in Beijing for decoding.

The Boeing 737 plane operated by China Eastern Airlines nosedived into a terraced field in China’s southern Guangxi region while en route Guangzhou province, in what is believed to be China’s worst air disaster in nearly three decades.

An air traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply but got no reply, officials have said.

All 132 people onboard, including nine crew members, died in the crash with search teams discovering human remains at the site scanning a total of 46,000sq metres of area.

Authorities said on Saturday that forensic and criminal investigation experts had confirmed the identities of 114 passengers and six crew members, or 120 of the 132 people on the flight.

It could be weeks before analysts reach a conclusion on what transpired on Monday. The investigation is being led by China but the United States was invited to take part because the Boeing 737 was designed and manufactured there.

China Eastern, one of China’s four major airlines, and its subsidiaries have grounded all of their 737-800 aircraft, a total of 223 planes. The carrier said the grounding was a precaution, not a sign that anything was wrong.

Additional reporting by agencies