Rescue groups have managed to find one of the black boxes from the China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 that was captured on video early this week plummeting vertically into a mountain range in a crash that left no currently known survivors.
“The device recovered from the China Eastern Airlines plane was believed to be the cockpit voice recorder,” stated the New York Times in a report. “The part of the device that stored the voice recordings wasn’t as badly damaged as the recorder itself.”
Recently, Flightradar24 put forth data from the Monday flight that reported that the aircraft was holding a cruising altitude of just over 29,000 feet when it then proceeded to fall over 20,000 feet in a little under a minute before slamming vertically into the mountain range in southern China.
“The Boeing 737-800 was knifing through the air at more than 640 miles (966 kilometers) per hour, and at times may have exceeded 700 mph,” reported Bloomberg News. “Sound travels at 761 mph at sea level but slows with altitude as air temperature goes down and is about 663 mph at 35,000 feet.”
As highlighted by The Air Current, the fact that Flightradar24 was able to get this data from the plane as it plunged rapidly towards the ground seems to mean that “the aircraft had electrical power and was able to broadcast tracking telemetry.”
“It really catches your eye when you see how rapidly the aircraft went from this horizontal flight,” stated a former Federal Aviation Administration accident investigator, Mike Daniel. “On any given investigation, you can’t rule out foul play at the very beginning,” he continued. “It was so abrupt that everything needs to be looked at.”
Neil Hansford, an Australian aviation expert, stated that he does not entirely believe that the cause of the crash was any form of technical issue.
“Even with total loss of power, no aircraft plummets to the ground from 20,000 feet in two minutes with an event at 8,000 feet,” claimed Hansford. “I think aircraft technical failure can be ruled out and it will be an external event … I would get on a Boeing 737-800 in an instant with an Australian carrier, so my suggestion would be it won’t be Boeing or aircraft technical related.”
“It is very unlikely the pilot passed out as the non-flying pilot would have been able to very safely take over the flying and land the aircraft,” he concluded. “Likely scenarios include pilot suicide, aircraft mid-air collision with military aircraft (they don’t have transponders like civil aircraft), [flight MU5735] was struck by a missile or an on-board explosion. My tipping is a human-induced event or bought down by rogue missile. Debris looks like MH117 over Ukraine, and the Chinese are providing too much information this time which is uncharacteristic.”