Chinese authorities have been accused of concealing details surrounding a suspected deliberate passenger plane crash that claimed the lives of all 132 people on board.
New details published by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) appear to confirm long-running suspicions that China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 was intentionally crashed into mountains in Guangxi province in March 2022 – only for Beijing to suppress information.
The Boeing 737 had been cruising between Kunming and Guangzhou when both engines were manually shut down, the autopilot was disengaged, and the aircraft was forced into a steep nosedive, according to the US findings.
Data extracted from the flight recorders showed a terrifying struggle inside the cockpit, with two pilots fighting over the controls as the jet plunged towards the ground.
The NTSB said: ‘It was found that while cruising at 29,000ft, the fuel switches on both engines moved from the run position to the cut-off position. Engine speeds decreased after the fuel switch movement.’
Graphs released by the American agency showed opposing movements on the pilot’s control yokes, indicating one crew member was attempting to recover the aircraft while another continued forcing it into a dive.
Video captured from the ground showed the plane plunging almost vertically from the sky.
No distress call was made by the crew, and no emergency transponder code was transmitted before the impact.
Last year, China’s Civil Aviation Administration warned that any further ‘disclosure [about the crash] may, if released, endanger national security and social stability’.
The NTSB has been asked to decode the aircraft’s black boxes after the crash and sent its findings to Chinese authorities just two weeks after the recorders were recovered in 2022.
Extracts were only released publicly this week after a Chinese citizen submitted a freedom of information request in the United States.
According to Mail Online, the agency said the flight data recorder stopped after around 90 seconds because of a power failure, although the battery-powered cockpit voice recorder continued operating.
The NTSB said it no longer holds a copy of the audio after transmitting it to Beijing.
Chinese investigators have repeatedly stated in previous updates that the aircraft’s systems appeared to be functioning normally before the crash.
Just two months after the disaster, however, a US investigator told The Wall Street Journal that ‘the plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit’.
References to the report were later scrubbed from Chinese social media.
Three pilots were on the flight deck at the time of the crash – Captain Yang Hongda, 32, first officer Zhang Zhengping, 59, and trainee second officer Ni Gongtao, 27.
Speculation in China has focused heavily on Zhang, one of the airline’s senior pilots, who had reportedly recently lost his captain’s rank.
No official conclusion identifying responsibility has ever been published.