By John Ikani
A Chinese passenger plane with 132 people on board has crashed in a mountainous area of southern China.
The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou when it came down in hills in Guangxi province and caught fire.
Chinese state media said the crash had caused a mountain fire, adding that the number of casualties is unknown.
Confirming the crash via a statement on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, China Eastern Airlines said it is sending workers to the site of the crash and has opened a hotline for family members.
Similarly, China’s aviation authority said it had “activated the emergency mechanism and dispatched a working group to the scene,” according to a translation.
What you should know
China Eastern is one of China’s three major air carriers, operating scores of domestic and international routes serving 248 destinations.
The safety record of the country’s airline industry has been among the best in the world over the past decade.
The last serious passenger plane crash in China was in 2010, when 42 people died on a Henan Airlines Embraer E-190 flight.
Monday’s crash comes as Boeing has been trying to recover its reputation after a number of major incidents in recent years.
The company’s 737 Max passenger aircraft was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 — and longer in some places — after manufacturing faults were found to have caused two fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Indonesia’s Lion Air Flight 610 crashed on Oct. 29, 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 came down on March 10, 2019, killing a combined 346 people.
