No survivors found in China Eastern crash, officials say

Emergency workers have found no survivors more than 24 hours after a Boeing 737 plane carrying 132 people crashed in southern China, officials said Tuesday. Hundreds of firefighters, police officers and paramilitary troops have been scouring the hillsides for survivors, using flashlights into the night on Tuesday. But the likelihood that anyone made it out alive appeared increasingly slim. The China Eastern Airlines plane, Flight MU5735, had plunged from 29,000 feet in the air to earth on Monday in Teng County in the region of Guangxi, scattering burning debris across the remote countryside. At the crash site, workers found parts of the plane, as well as personal belongings such as identity cards, purses and cellphones, news reports said. Emergency workers were also focused on locating the plane’s so-called black boxes, said Zhu Tao, the director of aviation safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, “The aircraft was severely damaged in this accident, and the investigation is very difficult,” he said. “With the information currently available, it is still impossible to make a clear judgment on the cause of the accident.” Zhu confirmed a few details about the trajectory of the plane that had emerged in flight data shared by Flightradar24, a tracking platform, while also describing for the first time how air traffic controllers had tried to contact the plane when they noticed something amiss. An aerial picture posted by a state news outlet showed a deep, charred gash in the land that the plane created when it struck a terraced farm field. The falling debris had split trees and bamboo groves, one journalist on the site said, and another report shared footage of the same area covered in white debris.<br/>