Wed 23 March: China 737, Russian Jets Seized, A321XLR, Kuwait, Oneworld & More
Your Aviation Briefing
Hello, here’s your Aviation Briefing for Wednesday 23 March 2022.
We begin with China, where investigators are continuing to search for the black box of the crashed Boeing 737-800. The China Eastern Airlines passenger jet was involved in the fatal accident on Monday after plummeting from its cruising altitude whilst en-route from Kunming to Guangzhou, in China. Boeing and the US National Transportation Safety Board responsible for civil transportation accident investigation have confirmed they are assisting Chinese authorities in the search for answers.
The state-owned airline was operating an afternoon passenger flight with 132 onboard. After a sudden, so-far unexplained 80-second nosedive, the aircraft crashed into mountains in Tengxian, Guangxi. China’s civil aviation authority confirmed 132 people onboard: 9 crew members (pilots and cabin crew) and 123 passengers. Our thoughts are with the families following China’s worst air disaster in recent history. The diagram below depicts the final 150 seconds of data from the flight, beginning just before its first descent from 29100 feet. It’s based on granular data collected by flightradar24, and is consistent with the footage of the horrifying nosedive — footage Chinese authorities have since verified.
Why is the black box important? The black box (which is orange in colour) is made up of two separate pieces of equipment: the flight data recorder, and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR). If authorities can locate the black box, and if it’s intact and able to have its data extracted, it’ll almost certainly give investigators an idea of what was happening in the flight deck during those devasting final 90 seconds of what should have been an ordinary flight to Guangzhou. In some previous aircraft incidents, it has taken several months or even years to locate the black box, especially when the aircraft has come down over an area of terrain, or the sea.
China and the Boeing 737-800 has for decades been an aviation success story. China is the world’s largest market for the 737-800.