One Black Box From Guangxi Plane Crash Recovered

Emergency workers found on Wednesday one of two black boxes from a China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed this week with 132 people onboard.

The black box device recovered is the plane's cockpit voice recorder, based on an early assessment, a Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) official told a media briefing, adding that the recording material appeared to have survived impact in relatively good shape.

"An initial inspection showed that the exterior of the recorder has been severely damaged, but the storage units, while also damaged to some extent, are relatively complete," CAAC official Zhu Tao said.

The black box is being sent to an institute in Beijing for decoding, although how long that takes would depend on the extent of the damage, Zhu said.

Meanwhile, Mao Yanfeng, head of aircraft investigation at CAAC, said weather along the jet’s flight path did not pose any danger to the aircraft and air controllers had communication with it after take-off and prior to its rapid descent.

Earlier, searchers had used hand tools, drones and sniffer dogs under rainy conditions to comb the heavily forested slopes for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, as well as any human remains.

Crews also worked to pump water from the pit created when the plane hit the ground, but their efforts were suspended around mid-morning because small landslides were possible on the steep, slick slopes.

China Eastern Flight 5735 was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew from Kunming in Yunnan province to Guangzhou when it crashed Monday afternoon outside the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi. All 132 people on board are presumed killed.

Investigators say it is too early to speculate on the cause. The plane went into an unexplained dive an hour after departure and stopped transmitting data 96 seconds into the fall. (Reuters/AP)

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