Two years after air disaster, Chinese investigators offer no clues as to why jet nosedived

Hong Kong CNN —

Two years after a Boeing 737-800 passenger jet nosedived 29,000 feet into a remote mountain, killing all 132 people on board, investigators in China have failed to offer new insight into the cause of the country’s deadliest air disaster in decades.

In an update of its probe released Wednesday ahead of the crash anniversary, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) did not address the crucial question of what had prompted China Eastern flight 5735 to nosedive, nor did it mention data from the plane’s black boxes that would offer key clues to explain what happened.

Instead, its statement merely reiterated earlier findings that it found no problems with the aircraft, crew or weather conditions before the flight departed the southwestern city of Kunming for Guangzhou on March 21, 2022.

The update failed to quell speculation in China about what caused the fatal crash, with some asking why investigators had not disclosed information from the black boxes.

Black boxes record all relevant flight data, as well as conversations in the cockpit, which are used by investigators to reconstruct the events leading to an aircraft incident.

In a summary of its preliminary report released in April 2022, the CAAC said the two black boxes of the crashed China Eastern jet were “severely damaged” and “the data restoration and analysis work is still in progress.”

But sophisticated laboratories like those run by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and its counterparts in France, Australia and the United Kingdom, can reconstruct even broken memory cards and then line up the data with audio feeds into the cockpit voice recorder.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2022 that black box data