One of the China Eastern 'black boxes' is recovered as heavy rain falls at crash site,

[Native]

Source: The Washington Post

Two days after the tragedy, search teams have not found survivors from the flight carrying 132 people, and state media called the chance of anyone surviving “extremely small.” Authorities said Wednesday evening that they had retrieved one of the plane’s two black boxes, which contain recorded information from the flight.

The black box is “seriously damaged,” Mao Yanfeng, director of the accident investigation department of the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s Aviation Safety Office, said at a news conference.

State broadcaster CCTV said the device was preliminarily identified as the cockpit voice recorder and has been sent to Beijing for repair and decoding. The plane also had a flight data recorder.


Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/23/china-plane-crash-black-box/?utm_source=reddit.com

[maxsolomon]

1. Pilot Suicide.

That's my prediction.

I don't know that Mao Yanfeng will be allowed to admit that publicly.

[Native]

2. My guess too.

[Coventina]

4. Hard to imagine any other cause for what happened.

I'm not an aviation expert by a long shot, but hard to explain how mechanical failure would have caused a nosedive like that.

[brooklynite]

5. Highly unlikely

Putting a plane like that into a dive would be much more gradual than the path shows, and if the co-pilot was fighting him there'd be much more variation.

[paleotn]

6. Unless it was a massive control surface failure...

similar to Alaska Airlines flight 261. Both use a jackscrew mechanism for elevator control, so, like AA 261, it could be a maintenance issue. Other than that, there's not much that will pitch a commercial airliner into that sort of a dive...other than a pilot doing it intentionally. Your prediction was my first thought upon seeing the video.

[llashram]

3. nose first into the ground

height, weight, speed. No one could survive that. And pilots went first...yikes!