One ‘severely damaged’ black box of crashed China Eastern jet found, say officials

Rescue operations were stopped Wednesday due to bad weather; relatives of the dead gather in a nearby village.

This photo taken on 21 March 2022 shows fragments of wreckage of the China Eastern passenger jet which crashed onto a mountainside in China's southern Guangxi region | Photographer: CNS/AFP/Getty Images via Bloomberg

New Delhi: One of the two black boxes on the ill-fated China Eastern jet that crashed killing all 132 on board has been found.

Chinese officials said the black box was severely damaged and it was difficult to tell whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder.

The discovery of the black boxes is necessary to find out why the plane literally fell from the sky and almost touched the speed of sound before crashing into a forested hillside in southern China’s Guangxi.

Mao Yanfeng, the director of the accident investigation division of the Civil Aviation Authority of China, told media on Wednesday that an all-out effort was being made to find the other black box, news agency Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, bad weather has halted rescue operations in the area. Chinese media reported that relatives of some of the dead arrived at Lu village near the crash site. But they were stopped by police officials.