China plane crash that killed 132 may have been intentional, report says
The fatal crash of a China Eastern Airlines plane may have been intentional, according to a report.
The Boeing-737 plummeted in March while carrying 132 people. There were no survivors, making the air disaster China's worst in a decade.According to the Wall Street Journal, flight data from one of the plane's black boxes indicated someone in the cockpit crashed the jet deliberately.
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The article cited people familiar with the preliminary assessment of US officials.
The Boeing-737 was travelling from Kunming to the industrial centre of Guangzhou when it crashed in Guangxi province with 123 passengers and nine crew aboard.
The crash ignited a fire big enough to be seen on Nasa satellite images.
The plane had been travelling at around 30,000ft when suddenly it entered a deep dive at its cruising altitude speed of 455 knots (more than 500mph), according to data from flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.com. The data suggests the plane crashed within a minute-and-a-half of whatever went wrong. It stopped transmitting data just south-west of the Chinese city of Wuzhou, a city of three million in eastern Guangxi.
China’s last fatal crash of a civilian airliner was in 2010.