Boeing shares down pre-market: Boeing plane crash in China may have been intentional

Flight data indicated that someone in the cockpit deliberately crashed the Boeing 737-800, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Corresponding commands were entered into the control. The paper relied on sources familiar with the preliminary findings of the US investigators. “The plane did as it was told by someone in the cockpit,” one person was quoted as saying.

The circumstances of the crash, in which the plane fell steeply to the ground, were puzzling from the start. The traffic machine crashed headfirst into a hilly area near Wuzhou in the southern Chinese region of Guangxi, around 300 kilometers west of the metropolis of Guangzhou. There were no indications of technical problems. No emergency call was made either. Rather, ground control could not reach the crew when the plane suddenly lost altitude en route from Kunming to Guangzhou.

The circumstances brought back memories of the March 2015 crash of the Germanwings plane en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf in the western Alps of southern France. All 150 occupants were killed. The French investigators then found that the German co-pilot had locked himself in the cockpit in order to deliberately steer the plane into a mountain. As it turned out later, the 28-year-old suffered from psychological problems.

China’s aviation authority (CAAC) did not comment on the revelations of the “Wall Street Journal”. The party-affiliated newspaper “Global Times”, which is often used as a mouthpiece, reported, referring to people involved in the investigations by the CAAC together with the US Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), that “no relevant information from the investigations was given to the media”. had been. In April, the Chinese authorities still firmly rejected similar media reports as “rumours” with “false information”.

Relatives of the victims demand clarification about the cause of the crash: The uncle of an 18-year-old student from Guangzhou appealed to the Chinese airline to make the previous findings known. “If that’s true, it’s so terrible,” Ouyang told the South China Morning Post. “China Eastern Airlines must give us a clear explanation.” After initial speculation about the cause of the crash, the airline emphasized in March that the health, family circumstances and financial status of the three pilots were good.

China’s airlines have a good reputation. It’s been 12 years since the last major crash. Since the Chinese authorities have not yet pointed out possible technical problems, the investigators are concentrating on the actions of the pilots, wrote the “Wall Street Journal”. Someone could also have entered the cockpit and caused the crash on purpose, the paper quoted its sources as saying. However, the US investigators did not have all the information that their Chinese counterparts had.

According to the international air traffic convention, the US air traffic safety authority NTSB supports the investigations carried out by China and also analyzes the information from the flight recorder.

In pre-market US trading on the NYSE, Boeing shares temporarily lost 0.49 percent to $ 131.40 on Wednesday.

/lw/DP/ngu

Image sources: Boeing