China plane crash: Second black box, flight’s data recorder, retrieved
The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft, which departed from Kunming and was bound for Guangzhou on Monday, crashed into a mountainous area near Molang Village in Tengxian County in the city of Wuzhou, in the worst air disaster in over a decade in the country.
China has found the second black box belonging to the China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed on Monday killing 132 people. CAAC News, a publication managed by the aviation regulator, said that rescuers retrieved the second black box on the fourth day of the search operations.
The crashed airliner had two black boxes, one in the cockpit and one in the tail to record various data. One of the two black boxes, the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, was recovered on Wednesday by the rescuers in severely damaged condition. The device has been sent to Beijing for analysis.
Aircraft black boxes are generally in bright orange-red so they can be found quickly after a flight accident. They are built to withstand explosions, disintegration, high temperature combustion, immersion in water and other damage, and the battery lasts for about 30 days.
A China Eastern flight 5735 carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members crashed outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region on Monday while flying from Kunming, the capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, to Guangzhou, an industrial centre not far from Hong Kong on China’s southeastern coast. It ignited a fire big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images before firefighters could extinguish it.
No survivors have been found among the 132 people, Sun Shiying, chairman of China Eastern Airlines Yunnan branch, had said on Tuesday night.
News Credit: India TV News