The first indications that emerged from the examination of the black boxes is that the Boeing of China Eastern, which crashed to the ground on March 21 with 123 passengers and 9 crew members, was intentionally crashed and it is not clear whether by choice of someone who found in the cabin, of a pilot or an intruder. The Wall Street Journal reports it, giving an account of the preliminary reconstructions of the accident. The plane was traveling at high altitudes when it suddenly changed course to crash in a dive and without any alarm or request for help in the rugged mountains of Wouzhou.
The plane did what it was asked to do
Flight data indicated that someone in the cockpit intentionally crashed the China Eastern Boeing 737-800, according to sources familiar with US officials’ preliminary assessment of the causes of the tragedy that claimed the lives of 132 people. The perfectly functioning plane did in other words what it was “asked to do” from high altitude navigation to the sudden almost vertical descent at the speed of sound to the crash and pulverization of the aircraft into nearly 50,000 pieces. Data from a recovered black box (the second was in conditions defined as “problematic”) in fact suggested that command inputs pushed the plane into the fatal dive, the WSJ wrote. Officially the investigation is managed by the Chinese authorities, but the analysis of the black boxes ended up in the hands of a Western investigative team in the US: the situation has created discontent among the parties.
Attention is focused on the commander
Flight MU-5735 took off from Kunming Changshui airport on March 21, shortly after 1pm local time (6am in Italy) bound for Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, while about an hour later it lost altitude without sounding alarms or signals. About 40 seconds after the crash, the Boeing had regained slightly altitude, but at 14.23 the ground radar had stopped receiving signals until the last part of the dive and the devastating impact on the mountainous area of Wuzhou, Guangxi. It is difficult to attribute responsibility at the moment, even if according to the Wall Street Journal the attention would have focused on the commander.
The previous German Wings with the suicide co-pilot
If the rumors are officially confirmed, the case brings to mind that of the German plane German Wings crashed on purpose by the suicide co-pilot Andrea Lubitz in March 2015 in the mountains of the Maritime Alps, in France. In that case 150 people died.
The co-pilot took advantage of a moment’s absence on the part of the captain to lock himself in the cabin: the door could not be opened from the outside following the security measures introduced against possible terrorist attacks. Dramatic details emerge from the recording of the minutes preceding the crash. The pilot who was locked out of the cockpit yells repeatedly in the final stages as he tried to knock the door down with an ax, “for God’s sake, open the door, open this damn door.”