Aviation experts are baffled by data showing that a China Eastern Boeing 737-800 about to begin its descent to the city of Guangzhou suddenly plunged vertically to earth like a missile, killing the 123 passengers and nine crew aboard.
about to begin its descent to the city of Guangzhou suddenly plunged vertically to earth like a missile, killing the 123 passengers and nine crew aboard on Monday., highlights that the kind of data that once took investigators at least days to gather is now instantly available from open source tracking sites like FlightRadar. As a result, speculation about the cause of a crash creates an instant Twitter storm as pilots and technical experts attempt to interpret what they are looking at.
The flight pattern revealed by radar shows that the airplane was flying at 29,100 feet over mountainous terrain, with the crew about to prepare for the descent, when the nose abruptly pitched down and it began the dive. As it neared the terrain it seemed to briefly pull up but then resumed the dive to impact with enormous force.
There have been several cases of various models of the 737 suffering an explosive decompression, when part of the fuselage structure, weakened by undetected cracks in the outer skin, suddenly rips open and the air in the pressurized cabin is released in a blast, but even with that damage pilots have been able to get the airplane down safely, even with parts of the cabin open to the skies.
There was a case where a similar dive was involved: in 1997 Silk Air Flight 185, when an earlier model 737 crashed into a river in Sumatra, killing 104 people, where an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the pilot had deliberately triggered the dive in an act of suicide, but this verdict was disputed by Indonesian regulators, who cited problems with the rudder controls that had caused other crashes of that model.
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