By Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher

 BEIJING – Emergency workers have found no survivors more than 24 hours after a Boeing 737 plane carrying 132 people crashed in southern China, officials said Tuesday (22).

Hundreds of firefighters, police officers and paramilitary troops have been scouring the hillsides for survivors, using flashlights into the night Tuesday. But the likelihood that anyone made it out alive appeared increasingly slim.

The China Eastern Airlines plane, Flight MU5735, had plunged from 29,000 feet in the air to earth Monday (21) in Teng County in the region of Guangxi, scattering burning debris across the remote countryside. At the crash site, workers found parts of the plane, as well as personal belongings such as identity cards, purses and cellphones, news reports said.

Emergency workers were also focused on locating the plane’s so-called black boxes, Zhu Tao, director of aviation safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said at a news conference in Wuzhou city, near the crash site. Black boxes are flight data and voice recorders that will be crucial to determining what caused the crash. Zhu acknowledged that officials had uncovered little information so far.

“The aircraft was severely damaged in this accident, and the investigation is very difficult,” he said. “With the information currently available, it is still impossible to make a clear judgment on the cause of the accident.”

Zhu confirmed a few details about the trajectory of the plane that had emerged in flight data shared by Flightradar24, a tracking platform, while also describing for the first time how air traffic controllers had tried to contact the plane when they noticed something amiss.

The plane been cruising at about 29,000 feet around 2:17 p.m. Monday, he said, but a few minutes later, air traffic controllers had noticed that the plane had suddenly lost altitude. He said the controllers immediately called the plane crew but did not receive a reply after several attempts. By 2:23 p.m., the plane’s radar signal disappeared, he said, and it had crashed.

The search effort is likely to increasingly turn to looking for the remains of passengers. Late Monday, Ou Ling, a local fire department official involved in the search, told the state broadcaster that his team had not found any survivors but had seen “relatively large fragments of wings, as well as remains.”

Investigators will also be searching for evidence of what caused the crash.

It is unclear how much data could be retrieved from the flight recorders, according to Mike Daniels, a former Federal Aviation Administration accident investigator who now works as an industry consultant.

“With that kind of crash — that amount of speed and downward velocity — the recorders are going to be damaged,” he said.

“Even if they find the recorders, are they actually going to be able to read them?” he said. “That’s going to be a huge challenge for the Chinese investigators.”

China’s record of safe air travel in the past two decades has become a point of pride for officials, and comfort for travellers.

The Chinese government, China Eastern Airlines and Boeing will all be under pressure to help explain how a plane could speed earthward with such destructive force.

China’s civil aviation authority announced a two-week drive of intensified safety checks on planes. Nearly three quarters of 11,800 flights that had been scheduled for Tuesday in China were cancelled, Bloomberg reported, citing VariFlight, an aviation data firm.

Many people on Chinese social media sites have noted that China had gone 4,226 days without a major aviation accident, an enviable record after a string of disasters in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The crash has already attracted a rush of speculation online about the cause.

Aviation experts have said the unusual trajectory of the plane — flying steadily, then turning sharply downward — opened up a range of possible explanations, including foul play or catastrophic equipment failure. But they emphasized that it was too early to do more than hypothesize about why the plane sped downward without any apparent warning signs.

“It really catches your eye when you see how rapidly the aircraft went from this horizontal flight,” Daniels said. “On any given investigation, you can’t rule out foul play at the very beginning. It was so abrupt that everything needs to be looked at.”

A commentary on the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s news website warned against spreading rumours and conspiracy theories, and urged the public to wait until a thorough investigation had reached its findings.

That article denied speculation that China Eastern Airlines had cut its plane maintenance budget. The company’s spending on maintenance rose 12% from 2019 to 2021, it said. A widely circulated Chinese online posting Monday claiming that the crash followed cuts in the airline’s spending had been censored by Tuesday morning.

Sun Shiying, an official with China Eastern Airlines, said at the news conference Tuesday that the plane and its nine crew members had met flight requirements before takeoff. He did not directly respond to questions about the aircraft’s maintenance history and the number of flight hours the pilot had accumulated.

Boeing said in an emailed statement that “our technical experts are prepared to assist with the investigation led by the Civil Aviation Administration of China.”

By Monday afternoon, the identity of one of the passengers missing, and most likely dead, emerged: Fang Fang, the chief financial officer of Dinglong Culture, a mining and resources company in Yunnan province, where the flight began. Her company said she was on the flight but denied rumours that six other company managers were also on it.

China’s vice premier, Liu He — a powerful official who usually steers economic policy — has been assigned to oversee the rescue effort and investigation into the causes of the disaster. On Monday, the top leader, Xi Jinping, issued orders to spare no effort in the search and rescue operation, and the investigation into the cause of the crash.

-New York Times