Intentional Fuel Cut-Off Caused 2022 China Plane Crash That Killed 132, Report Claims

More than four years after a tragic plane crash in China that killed all 132 people on board, new findings have raised fresh questions about what happened in the final moments before the disaster, reported CNN.

The Boeing 737-800 aircraft, operating as China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735, had plunged 29,000 feet and crashed into a mountain in the Guangxi region in March 2022. 

It was the country's deadliest air disaster in decades. However, the Civil Aviation Administration of China has not addressed the key question of what caused the sudden nosedive.

Now, data released by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in response to a freedom of information request has indicated that the fuel switches to both engines were shut off at the same time before the aircraft fell from the sky.

The data came from the plane's flight data recorder, one of the two "black boxes" that store operational information. 

It was recovered from the crash site and sent to the NTSB laboratory in Washington DC for analysis, as the aircraft was manufactured in the United States.

The NTSB report stated that while the aircraft was cruising at 29,000 feet, the fuel switches on both engines moved from the run position to the cutoff position, and engine speeds decreased after the movement.

Fuel switches on commercial aircraft are physical controls that regulate the flow of fuel to the engines. On this model, a pilot must lift the switch before moving it from run to cutoff.

Aviation safety analyst David Soucie said that the data clearly shows the fuel switches were manually placed in the off position just before the crash. He added that there was no indication the switches were turned back on, which suggested there was no attempt to restart the engines. He further said that if the switches had been turned off by mistake, the pilots would have tried to turn them back on.

According to the report, the flight data recorder stopped working when the aircraft's generators lost power at 26,000 feet and did not capture the final moments of the crash. However, the cockpit voice recorder continued recording using a battery backup.

US investigators were able to retrieve four voice recordings from the damaged cockpit recorder and sent them to Chinese authorities, but the NTSB said it did not keep a copy of the audio files.