A Chinese passenger plane with 132 people on board crashed in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Monday, March 21, the regional emergency management department said. The Boeing 737 aircraft of China Eastern Airlines, which flew from Kunming to Guangzhou, crashed in Tengxian County in the city of Wuzhou, causing a mountain fire, the department was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.
The 132 people included 123 passengers and nine crew members, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said on its website. The number of casualties is not clear yet, the report said. However, rescuers have been assembled and are approaching the site. According to news portal The Paper, a staff member at Guangzhou's Baiyun International Airport said that flight MU5735 from Kunming to Guangzhou has not arrived at its destined time, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.
The domestic flight was scheduled to take off from Kunming at 1.10 pm (local time) and arrive at Guangzhou at 2.52 pm (local time) and is now marked out of reach on Baiyun airport's app. Following the accident, videos and pictures purporting to come from the scene started circulating on social media showing smoke billowing from a hillside and wreckage on the ground.
China Eastern is one of China's three major air carriers. China's airlines had recorded over 100 million continuous hours of safe flight as of February 19, according to Zhu Tao, an official with the Civil Aviation Administration, the Post reported.
Crash site of China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, which had 133 people on board pic.twitter.com/gO1HIAEj1G
— BNO News (@BNONews) March 21, 2022
【Crash site】A Boeing 737 passenger plane carrying 133 people from China Eastern Airlines had an accident in Teng County, Guangxi and then triggered a mountain fire. At present, the rescue team has gathered, the casualties are still unknown. pic.twitter.com/udlT6qqKWZ
— 豆腐Toufu.exe️ (@y1499003) March 21, 2022
The last domestic fatal incident was in 2010, when a plane crashed in Yichun, Heilongjiang province, killing 42 people. The Henan Airlines plane had 96 people on board, and 53 people were injured, according to The Guardian. The crash was a result of the plane overshooting the runway outside China’s Yichun, at the Lindu airport.