China Eastern Crash Data Suggests Foul Play in Cockpit

(MENAFN) More than four years after a China Eastern Airlines jet slammed into a mountainside in southern China — killing all 132 people on board — explosive new data suggests the catastrophe may have been no accident.

Media reported Monday that the newly surfaced information "appears to indicate that someone in the cockpit may have intentionally switched off the fuel supply to the engines," casting a chilling new light on one of the deadliest aviation disasters China has witnessed in decades.

Flight MU5735, operating a Boeing 737-800, entered a fatal nosedive in March 2022 over the remote Guangxi region, yet the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has to this day failed to officially determine what caused the aircraft to plunge violently from cruising altitude. The crash remains without a formal ruling on cause.

Data published by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) — extracted from the plane's flight data recorder, recovered at the crash site and subsequently shipped to the agency's Washington, DC laboratory for forensic analysis — revealed a deeply troubling sequence of events in the aircraft's final moments.

"It was found that while cruising at 29,000 feet (8,840 meters), the fuel switches on both engines moved from the run position to the cutoff position. Engine speeds decreased after the fuel switch movement," the NTSB report said.

On a commercial 737, fuel switches are manually operated controls governing engine fuel flow — and critically, a pilot must physically lift each switch before transitioning it from run to cutoff, ruling out accidental activation from turbulence or mechanical interference alone.

An aviation safety analyst David Soucie was unequivocal in his reading of the data.

"This data clearly shows that the fuel switches were manually placed in the off position just prior to the crash," he said.

He went further, closing the door on theories of pilot error or inadvertent action: "There is no indication the switches were placed back to the on position. That indicates there was no attempt to restart the engines. If the switches were turned off in error the pilots would have made an attempt to turn them back on."

The CAAC has previously rejected claims that the crash was deliberate, though it has yet to offer an alternative explanation consistent with the flight recorder evidence now in the public domain. Pressure is mounting on Chinese aviation authorities to reopen and conclusively resolve one of the country's most haunting unsolved air disasters.

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