Wednesday, February 19, 2025

China Eastern Airlines Resumes Boeing 737-800 Flights Nearly A Month After Fatal Crash

By Aritra Banerjee

Boeing 737-800s operated by China Eastern Airlines are being prepared to resume commercial operations. This development comes nearly a month after the fatal air crash of Flight MU5735, claiming 132 lives and resulting in the carrier grounding of 223 aircraft in the fleet. The carrier has claimed to have carried out a host of structural checkups, routine tests and verified airworthiness data for the aircraft part of its 737-800 fleet, and further highlighted that it would carry out test flights of the entire fleet before committing to commercial passenger flights. Boeing 737-800s with registration numbers close to Flight MU5735 are presently undergoing evaluations and maintenance checks. 

Test Flights Resume After Grounding

On Monday, 22 March, Flight MU5735, a Boeing 737-800 plane operated by China Eastern Airlines, carrying 132 people on board, crashed near a village in Teng county, near the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi. According to Flightradar24, the aircraft abruptly descended from cruising altitude, briefly interrupted when the plane began to climb. Flight MU5735 was flying eastward when it suddenly plunged at 2:20:59 PM, abruptly transitioning from a level flight to a plummet of 31,000 feet per minute. The drop was extranormal in terms of flight parameters. 

The next 45 seconds saw the decline become slightly less steep, and for a brief moment, the plane began to climb more than 1,000 feet. In the 10 seconds that followed, Flight MU5735 rose from 7,424 feet to 8,600 feet. This short-lived climb was followed by the aircraft resuming its violent descent at 31,000 feet per minute. The last position record of the flight radar was at 2:22:36 PM, approximately a minute and 35 seconds after the aircraft took off. 

Aviation analysts speculated that the earlier dive would have resulted in items onboard being flung up to the aircraft ceiling, while the rapid rise would have pinned people to their seats, a traumatic experience during a fatal flight that killed everyone on board. The crash was China’s deadliest civil aviation accident in nearly three decades and resulted in the grounding of 223 Boeing 737-800s operated by the airlines. 

According to Flightradar24 data, Chinese Eastern Airlines Flight MU5843 took off on 17 April from Kunming city at 9:58 AM and landed at Chengdu at 11:03 AM. Flightradar24 data also indicated that the aircraft which conducted a test flight on Saturday, 16 April returned to Kunming. The following day, another Boeing 737-800 took a test flight in Shanghai, where the airline is based.  

How Is The Investigation Progressing? 

After retrieving two black boxes, China said that it would submit its preliminary report to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), the United Nations aviation agency, within a month. A team of American investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had left for China to carry out a probe.

Online rumours, attributed to the black box, assert that the co-pilot might have been responsible, while others believe that the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) will mandate mental health monitoring for flight crews. However, the CAAC has refuted such rumours and has warned against speculation before the conclusion of the investigation.






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