The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said Monday that its investigation into flight MU5735 that crashed a year ago is still in progress as the case is "very complex and extremely rare."
The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft, which departed from Kunming in Yunnan province bound for Guangzhou in Guangdong province, crashed into a mountainous area near the village of Molang in Tengxian, in the county of Wuzhou, in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region on March 21, 2022. All 123 passengers and nine crew members died in the crash.
In the past year, the CAAC has strictly followed related regulations and conducted an in-depth, meticulous and rigorous investigation into the accident along with related departments.
Over the past year, the technical investigation team conducted a detailed inspection of the aircraft wreckage to determine the possible working state of the aircraft's key control components before the crash, and carried out experiments on more than 100 important pieces of debris to analyze the causes of damage. The team also carried out inspections into the qualifications and abilities of crew members, flight operation, airworthiness maintenance of aircraft, as well as the airline company's management. Other investigations have also been carried out including air traffic control services, airport ground support, and the security check of passengers, luggage and cargoes. Combined with the relevant data, the flight state of the aircraft in the final stage was analyzed, and the flight simulator and real aircraft were used for simulation and verification.
However, due to the complexity of the accident, investigation work must continue. The investigation team will continue to carry out cause analysis and experimental verification based on the previous work, and timely release relevant information according to the progress of the investigation, the administration said.
Disclosing information on the progress of an investigation to the public at the one-year mark is a common practice and requirement in the international civil aviation industry, Shao Quan, a professor at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told Xinhua.
Investigations into large aircraft crashes generally last more than a year as they face technical complexities and uncertainties, and many doubts and technical difficulties need to be repeatedly scrutinized, which is time-consuming, Shao said, explaining why the investigation is not yet complete.
Over the past 30 years, only 25 percent of civil aviation aircraft accident investigations in the world published final reports within a year, Shao added.
Gao Jun, an official of the China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation, said that investigations into aircraft crashes are complex processes, which usually require inspections of the qualifications and abilities of crew members, their operations, the airworthiness status of aircraft, weather conditions and airline management, among others.
Judging from what we currently know, the case is quite different from any seen in the past, as the aircraft almost completely disintegrated after falling to the ground at a high speed and the wreckage was scattered, which greatly increased the difficulty of on-site search and remains collection work and added to technical complexities, Gao said.
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