Photo: YouTube
There is little hope of finding survivors.
By Dan O'Reilly — Written on Mar 21, 2022
Video footage of a Chinese plane nose-diving towards the ground before a crash has left viewers baffled and devastated by the fate of its passengers.
The majority of things that go wrong during a flight tend to go wrong during landing or takeoff. Pilots will say that these are the times that have the slimmest margins for error and can have deadly consequences.
When something does go wrong, especially if it goes wrong at 30,000 feet, then accidents can be truly disastrous.
According to state media, the Chinese Boeing 737 crashed with 132 passengers on board.
A video of the Guangxi plane crash has gone viral.
The plane crashed into a remote mountain range near the city of Wuzhou after falling 30,000 feet in the middle of the day.
A fire broke out as a result of the crash and emergency services arrived shortly afterward to try and control the blaze.
Debris has been scattered across a wide area and several pictures of the devastation have been circulating online.
There has been no official word on the cause of the crash at this time.
Reportedly, Chinese aviation has grounded all similar aircraft to flight 5735 while they investigate the cause of the incident.
When a plane is forced to make a crash landing, the pilot will typically attempt to “land” the plane in a similar way to how they would on a runway under normal circumstances. Preliminary evidence suggests that that was not what happened in the case of flight 5735.
The plane was just damaged or destroyed in the crash, according to Chinese officials, flight 5735 completely disintegrated on impact, leaving little hope that anyone on board might have survived.
The plane reportedly descended 20,000 feet in only a little over a minute. The whole event happened very suddenly, with the last contact being made with the plane at 2:15 local time. At 2:20 local time, the plane started to rapidly lose altitude, before crashing into the ground only minutes after that.
Flight 5735 was last seen in a security video that showed it nose-diving toward the ground.
A lot of people are talking about the crash online.
Many are sharing their condolences as there is little hope that anyone survived the impact.
Some are starting to speculate as to the truth of the crash and its cause, though there is very little evidence to go off of at this point.
Dan O'Reilly is a writer who covers news, politics, and social justice. Follow him on Twitter.