China plane crash – live: Rain halts search operation as cause of nosedive remains unknown

Several locals from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region have volunteered to deliver tents, food and other relief supplies to the site by motorcycle to aid the rescue team looking for survivors and the aircraft’s black boxes.

On Tuesday, local villagers drove over 40 kms to bring bottled water and food to the rescue team, Global Times reported.

China has deployed drones to search for more evidence in an area of nearly 680,000 square metres around the site of the plane crash.

“The drones’ thermal imaging function will help locate the black boxes,” Zhang Xueliang, one of the rescuers, was quoted by state broadcaster CCTV as saying.

Rescuers are still making an all-out effort to retrieve the black boxes of the passenger plane that crashed in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region on Monday afternoon, an official said on Tuesday night.

The severe damage to the plane has made the investigation difficult, said Zhu Tao, head of the Civil Aviation Administration of China safety office.

He added that the investigation team is carrying out a probe in “accordance with the procedures, with rescuers exploring the crash site and going all out to search the black boxes”.

Rescue operations were temporarily stopped due to rain on Wednesday. According to local media, so far no survivors have been found and the cause of the crash remains unclear.

Rain water was filling the depression in the soft soil caused by the impact of the crash, and there were risks of landslides that could endanger rescue workers scouring the difficult, heavily forested terrain, state television reported.

China Eastern Airlines says it has reached out to the families of all 123 passengers who were onboard when the aircraft crashed on Monday.

China’s civil aviation regulator on Tuesday directed immediate launch of a two-week-long safety overhaul of the civil aviation sector following the plane crash that killed 132 people onboard.

The safety overhaul covers all regional air-traffic management bureaus, companies involved in civil aviation transport and general aviation, relevant service providers, airport operators, flight training organizations, among others.

That’s all from The Independent tonight.

We will bring you more on this tomorrow as we hear it.

The search continues in the hills of Guangxi.

No survivors have been found of the 132 onboard the Boeing 737-800 that crashed yesterday.

Rescue teams are hoping to find the plane’s black box, which could help experts determine the cause of the crash.

Sky News and CNN have been showing this footage that appears to show the China Eastern plane nosediving before crashing yesterday.

The footage was captured by a nearby CCTV camera, reports say.

The Boeing 737-800 aeroplane model had an “excellent safety record” according to the Flight Safety Foundation (FSH).

The plane has been flying since 1998 and Boeing has sold more than 5,100 of them.

It has been involved in 22 major accidents and killed 612 people.

“There are thousands of them around the world. It’s certainly had an excellent safety record,” FSH president Hassan Shahidi said of the 737-800.

China will lead the investigation into yesterday’s disaster. There will be a representative from the US crash investigator, as well as from Boeing and CFM, the company that made the plane’s engines.

Recovering the jet’s ‘black boxes’ is vital to the investigation.

One device, called the flight data recorder, captures information about the plane’s airspeed, altitude, direction, pilot actions, and performance of all key systems.

The cockpit voice record captures sounds including conversations and background engine noise during the flight. Investigators will look at the maintenance history of the plane, the training and record of the pilots, communication with air traffic control and weather data.

They will examine pieces of the wreckage for clues. The size of the debris field is also important - when wreckage is spread over a very large area, it could indicate that the plane was breaking up before hitting the ground.