China finds flight recorder from plane crash as rain hinders search

Rescuers found one of the flight recorders of the Boeing 737 plane that crashed in southern China with more than 130 people on board, officials said Wednesday, as regulators and the airline faced growing pressure to release more information about the disaster. Search efforts have been underway since the plane plummeted into a rural mountainside on Monday. The device recovered from the China Eastern plane was believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, officials said during a brief news conference on Wednesday. More fragments of the aircraft and body parts were also recovered, they added. No survivors have been found, and it is increasingly unlikely that anyone on board made it out alive. The Chinese government, faced with its worst air plane disaster in more than a decade, has moved quickly to control the flow of information, using a playbook it has honed over recent years that deploys propaganda and censorship. Its first official announcement on Monday, a two-line report from state television, came out nearly two hours after the crash, and provided only the basic details. Official media have since said little about what could have led to such a disaster, like if there were problems with the plane, the crew or the weather. Instead, state media has been dominated by scenes of emergency crews rushing to the scene and orders from China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to officials to do their utmost to find survivors. Government and airline officials did emerge to give a news conference a day after the crash, but they could not answer basic questions about the doomed plane, a six-year-old Boeing 737-800, or its pilots, drawing online criticism that officials were issuing “rainbow farts” — a common idiom to describe excessive praise. Censors deleted articles and social media posts that raised more detailed questions about the disaster. <br/>