It is now more than forty-eight hours since China Eastern MU5735 crashed in the mountains surrounding Wuzhou, China. There has been no news of any survivors and the black boxes from the Boeing 737-800 have not been found.

UPDATE: 2022/03/23 11:45 UTC BY TOM BOON

Black Box Found

According to the South China Morning Post, one of two black boxes onboard the aircraft has been recovered.

There are reports that heavy rain, forecast to continue all week, has forced the search for the black boxes to be suspended, due to the risk to search and rescue teams from landslides.

The US National Transportation Board (NTSB) has confirmed the appointment of a senior air safety investigator to the crash investigation, although they did not say if or when the NTSB will travel to the China crash site.

The NTSB also said that representatives from Boeing, engine maker CFM and the FAA will serve as technical advisers.

Foul play needs to be one of the things ruled out

Michael Daniel has served as a FAA senior policy manager, credentialed supervisory safety inspector and accident inspector in an aviation career spanning more than 35 years. He worked on two eerily similar investigations, SilkAir 185 and EgyptAir 990, where the aircraft experienced very sudden, very quick and very straight dives into the ground.

"The Egyptian authorities thought it was a mechanical problem with the 767 but the NTSB believed it was just too obvious what happened, so, similar to SilkAir I lean towards pilot suicide on those."

No investigator wants to speculate on such a human tragedy but given the extremely rapid and unexpected descent, Daniel says the prospect of foul play will be "one of the first things on the list of things to be ruled out."

Simple Flying spoke with Daniel today and he revealed that a photo of the descent appears to show parts of the aircraft tail empennage have come off or disintegrated and that investigators will need to know when and why that happened.

"In these high-speed descent accidents, like SilkAir, EgyptAir and Germanwings, parts of the plane will actually start coming off and if they're not in crater impact area, that's an indicator they came off before impact."

There are some reports that the aircraft leveled out around 8000 feet but Daniel says while there was a little bit of horizontal movement he didn't see anything that made him think "they were trying to fly or recover the airplane."

Can major component failure be ruled out yet?

Until the investigation has run its course, mechanical failure cannot be ruled out and Daniel says something like a major component in the tail empennage could cause an airplane to behave similarly. But he adds,

"This was so abrupt and so sudden and even with a major failure like that you still have a few seconds to do some kind of flight upset recovery, but this thing just came straight down."

Prior to this incident, China's last commercial crash was on August 24, 2010, when a Henan Airlines Embraer ERJ-190, crashed in low visibility on approach to Yichun City airport in northeastern China, killing 44 of the 96 people on board.

The aircraft, just two years old with 5109 flight hours, was operating a flight from the provincial capital of Harbin to Yichun. The investigation found the approach was below minimums and the crew did not make visual contact with the runway, impacting the ground 1110 meters short of the runway.

The Henan captain, Quan Jun was held responsible for the crash and sentenced to three years in jail in 2014, despite a litany of adverse findings on the airline. He appealed the decision the next day but that was denied in April 2015.