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A preliminary report by China’s air safety regulator summarized what worked during the flight, but did not speculate on what caused the plane to nose-dive.
BEIJING — The pilots had met China’s standards for flying a commercial jet. No problems were found with the aircraft before it took off. No dangerous cargo had been loaded aboard. Communications with the plane appeared normal until its deadly plunge.
A preliminary report released on Wednesday by China’s aviation safety regulator failed to dispel much of the mystery about why a China Eastern jet suddenly went into a nosedive in clear weather last month and crashed into a muddy hillside, killing all 132 people aboard. The report mainly cataloged what was previously known about the crash.
“The investigation found that the flight and cabin crew onboard, as well as the maintenance and clearance personnel, met qualification requirements,” the report said. “Before it deviated from cruising altitude, there was nothing abnormal in wireless communications between the crew and air control or in the control commands.”
The report also suggested that obtaining more evidence from the plane’s two flight recorders could take some time. “The two recorders on the plane were severely damaged in the crash,” it said, “and data recovery and analysis is proceeding.”
As a signatory to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, China’s regulator was under an obligation to produce a preliminary report on Wednesday, 30 days after the crash. But a summary statement issued by the regulator, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, did not put forward any theories to address why the plane, a Boeing 737-800, suddenly turned almost vertical while cruising at 29,000 feet and maintained that position except for a brief surge upward about two-thirds of the way down to the ground.
Commercial jets are designed to be naturally stable from front to back while in flight. They do not fly almost straight down at very high speed unless extreme force is continuously applied to the horizontal stabilizers on either side of the tail, aviation experts said in the days after the crash.
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