A plane with 132 people on board crashed in southern China on Monday, Chinese officials said.There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash or numbers of any dead or injured.
The Boeing 737 lost contact over Wuzhou during a flight between the southern cities of Kunming and Guangzhou, China Eastern Airlines and the country’s Civil Aviation Administration said. The 132 people on board included 123 passengers and nine crew members, they said.
The crash sparked a mountainside fire in the southern region of Guangxi, state media reported.Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered an “all-out” rescue effort, according to state news agency Xinhua.
Rescuers were dispatched to the crash site, local officials said, while the airline and the aviation administration also said they sent working groups to the scene.
Ambulances arrive at the scene after a China Eastern plane crashed in Guangxi, China on Monday.
A fire sparked by the crash burned down bamboo and trees before being put out, Reuters reported citing local media. Satellite data from NASA showed a massive fire in the area where the plane went down at the time of the crash.
The flight, MU5735, left Kunming at 1:11 p.m. (1:11 a.m. ET), with a scheduled arrival time less than two hours later, according to data from flight-tracking website FlightRadar24. It showed the Boeing 737-89P rapidly lost altitude just over an hour into the flight, descending from 29,000 feet in a matter of minutes to its last tracked position.
China Eastern launched an emergency hotline for families of those on board. One of China’s largest airlines, it carries more than 130 million passengers a year, according to its website, and has a fleet of 730 aircraft.
The aircraft was delivered to China Eastern from Boeing in June 2015 and had been flying for more than six years.Boeing, based in Chicago, said that it was aware of the initial media reports and working to gather more information.
The last deadly crash of a civilian jetliner in the country was in 2010.
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