NEWS: China
A Boeing 737 collapses to the ground after falling 29,100 feet in a minute and a half with 123 passengers.

The pas­sen­ger plane flown by Chi­na East­ern Air­lines crashed in Guangxi, Chi­na on Mon­day, offi­cial media said.

The pas­sen­ger plane was head­ing to Guangzhou from Kun­ming and was car­ry­ing nine crew mem­bers and 123 passengers.

CCTV said the acci­dent involv­ing the Chi­na East­ern 737 occurred near the city of Wuzhou in Teng County.

It said res­cuers had been dis­patched and there was no imme­di­ate word on the num­ber of deaths and injuries.

Accord­ing to offi­cial media reports, the acci­dent caused a for­est fire.

Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Net­work tweet­ed, “We are fol­low­ing sev­er­al uncon­firmed reports of a pos­si­ble acci­dent involv­ing Chi­na East­ern Air­lines Flight # MU5735 a Boe­ing 737–89P (B‑1791) en route from Kun­ming to Guangzhou, China.”

The Civ­il Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion of Chi­na said in a state­ment, “CAAC has acti­vat­ed the emer­gency mech­a­nism and sent a task force to the scene.

The Chi­na East­ern flight took off at 1:11 p.m. (05:11 GMT), accord­ing to FlightRadar24 data, and was sched­uled to land at 3:05 p.m. (0705 GMT).

The flight track­ing end­ed at 2:22 p.m. (0622 GMT) at an alti­tude of 30,000 feet with a speed of 376 knots.

The plane stopped trans­mit­ting data just south­west of the Chi­nese city of Wuzhou.

The Chi­na East­ern Air­lines web­site was then pre­sent­ed in black and white, which air­lines do in response to an acci­dent as a sign of respect for the pre­sumed victims.

Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping said he was “shocked” by the acci­dent and called for an inves­ti­ga­tion into the crash, offi­cial media reported.

“We are shocked to learn about the crash of Chi­na East­ern MU5735,” he said accord­ing to CCTV, while call­ing for “all efforts” to res­cue and find out the “cause of the acci­dent as soon as possible.”

The plane was deliv­ered to Chi­na East­ern by Boe­ing in June 2015 and had been fly­ing for more than six years.

The 737–800 mod­el that crashed Mon­day has a good safe­ty record and is the pre­de­ces­sor to the 737 MAX mod­el that has been ground­ed in Chi­na for more than three years fol­low­ing fatal acci­dents in 2018 in Indone­sia and 2019 in Ethiopia.

The safe­ty record of the Chi­nese air­line indus­try has been among the best in the world over the past decade.