BEIJING —
China Eastern Airlines resumed flying Boeing 737-800 aircraft on Sunday, flight
tracking data showed, just weeks after it grounded 223 planes over a crash that
killed 132 people.
اضافة اعلان
Flight MU5843,
operating the 800 variant of the 737, departed the southwestern city of Kunming
at 9:58am local time (0158 GMT) and landed in Chengdu at 11:03am, according to
Flightradar.com.
The three-year-old
jet later returned to Kunming from Chengdu, with further flights scheduled for
Tuesday.
Flight MU5735 — a
737-800 — was en route from Kunming to Guangzhou on March 21 when it nosedived
into a mountainside, disintegrating on impact.
The jet dropped
6,096m in just over a minute. The velocity of the impact left twisted metal and
passengers’ belongings scattered across a vast swathe of forest.
The cause of the
disaster,
China’s deadliest plane crash in more than 30 years, is not yet
known.
The accident
caused China Eastern to ground all of its 737-800s for safety checks as
aviation authorities vowed an extensive two-week inspection of China’s vast
passenger fleet.
Authorities have
retrieved both black boxes from the downed jet, which are currently being
analyzed at an American lab with the help of
investigators from the United States government.
A preliminary
investigation report would be completed within 30 days of the crash, the
government previously said.
China Eastern’s
resumption of 737-800 flights on Sunday came as Boeing awaits approval to
resume operation of the 737’s MAX variant in China, the last major market yet
to give the green light.
The 737 MAX was
temporarily grounded worldwide following two crashes in
Indonesia and
Ethiopia
that killed a combined 346 people in 2018 and 2019.
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