Maybe this post should be saved for Silent Sunday because it refers to the total silence from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) on the most important aspect of the MU5735 accident investigation.

You may remember the curious case of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735 that mysteriously crashed on March 21, 2022 while enroute from Kunming, China to Guangzhou. While cruising at its assigned altitude of 29,000 ft. (8,839m) the B737-800 (not a 737 MAX) abruptly and rapidly descended from an altitude of 29,000 ft. (8,839m) and crashed in hilly terrain.

mu5735-descent-profile-1920x1318-1-1

The dive was so steep and fast that the descent into terrain took less than 120 seconds. The impact destroyed the airframe and engines. All 123 passengers and nine crewmembers perished. Despite calls from air traffic control and nearby aircraft, there was no communication from the pilots during the descent.

The 737 is one of the most widely used commercial airliners. Passenger jets don’t just fall out of the sky for no reason. The causes of airline accidents must be identified, if possible, and steps taken to prevent recurrence.

My post of March 26, 2022, offered several plausible scenarios and identified one that, although shocking, seemed the most likely. It appears that this crash was the result of the extremely rare but not unprecedented situation in which a pilot flew a commercial airliner into the ground intentionally.

This conclusion is based on circumstantial evidence. There was no communication from the pilots during the dive, At one point the dive was stopped, and the plane climbed briefly before the final plunge. Also, the highly unusual situation in which the first officer had considerably more flight hours (31,000) than the captain (7,000) was never explained. Perhaps something in the first officer’s past made him unfit, permanently or temporarily, to serve as pilot in command.

The almost total destruction of the airframe and engines made a forensic examination of the wreckage of little value. The pilots shed no light on the cause directly. Therefore, the best evidence of the cause of the crash was the data from the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder — the so-called “black boxes.”

Both black boxes were recovered within days. Because the crash damaged the recorders and made data retrieval difficult, China sent the recorders the U.S. for analysis by the recorder manufacturers and the National Transportation Safety Board. Big mistake as far as secrecy.

In May 2022, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes reported that the black-box data indicated that someone one the flight deck manipulated the flight controls to cause the dive and crash.

In the two preliminary reports issued on the anniversaries of the crash, the CAAC mentions only that there were no issues found with the airplane, crew or weather. The reports say nothing about information from the black boxes or the rumors that the plane was crashed intentionally. That is not so surprising because the CAAC gets its orders from the CCP, Chinese Communist Party, and the CCP likes to maintain the fiction that everything is perfect in China.

What do you think happened to MU5735? Do you think there will ever be a final report that reveals the truth?