Chinese plane crash ‘was caused intentionally by someone in the cockpit’, black box suggests

The Chinese passenger jet which smashed into a mountain this year killing all 132 people on board was deliberately crashed by the pilot or an intruder, investigators have said.

Flight data from the black box recovered from the China Eastern Boeing 737-800 shows human input forced the plane into a nosedive as it plummeted to the ground in the mountainous Guangxi area on March 21. 

Experts believe it shows that only murder-suicide could explain how the plane ended up with a near vertical trajectory.

‘The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,’ a source told the Wall Street Journal.

While the pilot is a main suspect, investigators are now ruling out a crew member or passenger entering the flight deck and taking over the controls.  

Chinese authorities have not found any evidence of technical malfunction in the plane and the crew is being investigated, a Western official told Reuters. 

While en route from Kunming to Guangzhou the Boeing 737-800 crashed killing 123 passengers and nine crew members – with total deaths at 132 – in mainland China’s deadliest aviation disaster in 28 years. 

It also prompted China Eastern to ground all its 737-800 Boeing planes – raising fears about the aerospace company’s jets – which was reversed a month later. 

A report issued in April by the Civil Aviation Administration of China said no abnormalities had been found in the plane, its crew or external elements such as bad weather.

Investigators were then still attempting to extract data from the heavily damaged black box flight data and voice recorders. 

At the time of the crash, the crew made no report of problems before losing contact with air traffic control. 

Pictures show that the crash left a 65-foot-deep crater in a mountainside, shattered the plane and set off a fire in the surrounding forest.

More than 49,000 pieces of plane debris were found. It took two days to find the cockpit voice recorder and six days for the flight data recorder, which was buried 5 feet underground.

Pilots have taken aircrafts down before such as Germanwings Flight 9525 Andreas Lubitz, previously treated for depression and suicidal tendencies. 

He locked the captain out of the cockpit before crashing the plane kiling 150 people into a mountain near Prads-Haute-Bléone, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. 

There was also a 2013 LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 and an EgyptAir Flight 990 that led to the deaths of 33 and 217 people respectively. 

China Eastern, one of four major Chinese airlines, and its subsidiaries grounded all their Boeing 737-800s, more than 200 planes, following the crash but have since returned them to service.

The aircraft was delivered to China Eastern from Boeing in June 2015 and had been flying for over six years. 

The airline said the grounding was a precaution, not a sign of any problem with the planes, which are among the most relied upon by airlines worldwide. 

From mid-April it had resumed use of the 737-800 planes and Chinese regulators did not point to any technical recommendations on the 737-800, which has been in service since 1997 with a strong safety record, according to experts. 

Boeing – one of the biggest makers of aerospace technology – has been under fire recently over flight crashes involving 737-800. 

The company declined to comment and referred Reuters to the Chinese investigators while the US National Transportation Safety Board did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

China Eastern said: ‘Any unofficial speculation may interfere with the accident investigation and affect the real progress of the global air transport industry.’

Reuters reported that shares of Boeing were up 5.1% in afternoon trade.