No survivors found after China plane crash: aviation authority

Chinese aviation authorities said Tuesday they had found no survivors so far from a crashed China Eastern jet nearly 36 hours after it plunged into a mountainside with 132 people on board.

“Up to now, search and rescue work has not found any survivors,” Zhu Tao, director of the aviation safety office at China’s aviation authority told reporters in the first official comments on the likelihood all of the passengers dying in the air disaster.

Chinese recovery teams on Tuesday picked through the debris of a crashed jet after it inexplicably plummeted.

Hopes of finding any survivors had all but vanished a day after the Boeing 737-800 passenger jet nosedived into the mountain — likely making it China’s deadliest air crash in nearly three decades.

Questions mounted over the cause of the crash, which saw the stricken jet drop 20,000 feet (6,096 metres) in just over a minute before plunging into rugged terrain in southern China on Monday afternoon.
 

The airline has acknowledged that some aboard the jet, which was travelling from the city of Kunming to the southern hub of Guangzhou, had died, but there has been no official confirmation of the number of dead.

President Xi Jinping quickly called for a full probe following the crash as search teams armed with drones descended upon the site in a forested, rural area of Guangxi province.
 

On Tuesday, scorch marks were visible from the crash and resulting fire, rescue workers told AFP, with one speculating that passengers had been “totally incinerated” from the intensity of the blaze.

A villager near the sprawling crash site, giving only his surname Ou, recounted hearing a “sound like thunder” followed by a blaze that blistered the surrounding hills.

State media showed uniformed search teams clambering over upturned earth, blasted trees and scattered debris, including a section of plane bearing the carrier’s blue and red livery.

A torn wallet and a burned camera lens were among the eviscerated possessions captured on video by a reporter from the state-run People’s Daily who was able to enter the crash site.

But AFP journalists were blocked at a hillside checkpoint by a group of men identifying themselves as Communist Party members who said they had “orders from above” to prevent access.