One of the two Black Boxes of the Chinese Eastern aircraft which crashed on Monday with 132 people on board, has been recovered, according to Chinese aviation officials.
The Black Box was found on Wednesday with its casing severely damaged, two days after the flight crashed in the country’s south coast, with no survivor, the officials added.
There was however confusion over which of the two boxes had been located.
“The exterior is so damaged that investigators were not able to tell whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder,” said Mao Yanfeng, the director of the accident investigation division of the Civil Aviation Authority of China.
Mao also gave no information about the condition of the recording device inside the Black Box, but said an all-out effort is being made to find the other box.
“Recovering the black boxes will be the key to determining and key to figuring out what caused the crash.” Mao said.
The search for clues into why the jetliner dove suddenly and crashed into a mountain in southern China was temporarily suspended earlier Wednesday as rain slickened the debris field and filled the red-dirt gash formed by the plane’s fiery impact.
However, searchers had been using hand tools, drones and sniffer dogs under rainy conditions to comb the heavily forested slopes for the recorders as well as human remains while crews also worked to pump water from the pit created when the plane hit the ground, but their efforts were suspended around midmorning because small landslides were possible on the steep, slick slopes.
Mao and other officials at a news conference said members of the air crew were healthy, the aircraft had a clean maintenance record, the weather had been good during the flight and the crew had been in regular communication with air traffic controllers prior to going into a dive.
Relatives of passengers began arriving Wednesday at the gate to Lu village just outside the crash zone, where they, along with reporters on the scene, were stopped by police and officials who used opened umbrellas to block the view beyond.
The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and had a well-established safety record. It is an earlier model than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.
Monday’s crash was China’s worst in more than a decade. In August 2010, an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun and caught fire with 96 people on board, killing 44 of them.
