China Eastern Airlines crash: Rescue efforts on, no survivors found yet 

Airline says it will ground its entire Boeing 737-800 fleet

Rescuers worked overnight in the search for survivors from Monday’s crash of a China Eastern Airlines aircraft in the hills of southern China, while the airline, China’s second-largest, said it would ground its entire Boeing 737-800 fleet, media reports said.

The plane, with 132 people on board including nine crew, was bound for Guangzhou and crashed a little over an hour after taking off on Monday afternoon from Kunming. The aircraft was cruising at an altitude of 8,869 m (29,000 feet) at a speed of 845 km/h before a steep and sudden descent saw it plunge into the hills near a village in southern Guangxi province. 

Images from the site showed a hillside on fire and aircraft parts strewn across the landscape. The fire was extinguished by Monday evening, authorities said, with more than 500 firefighters deployed to the scene.

China’s President Xi Jinping on Monday said he was “shocked” to learn about the incident and ordered “all-out search and rescue efforts”. He also called for a prompt investigation into what went wrong.

China Eastern Airlines was reported to have said it will be grounding its entire Boeing 737-800, Chinese media outlet Yicai reported. It also quoted a local Guangxi hospital near the crash site as saying staff had been sent to help with rescue work, but no casualties had as yet been found at the scene, according to video footage received by the hospital. 

China’s two other major airlines, Air China and China Southern, have not as yet announced any decision on their Boeing 737-800 fleet. The 737-800 is regarded as among the most reliable and had no known problems unlike the Boeing 737 Max, which Chinese regulators had grounded for more than two years after crashes of the new model in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said on Monday it would place Boeing 737 aircraft on “enhanced surveillance”.