Dozens presumed dead in China’s worst aviation disaster in nearly a decade

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• Judy Woodruff:

  We return now to that jet crash in Southern China. More than 130 people appear to have been killed.

  William Brangham looks at the many questions around what happened.

• William Brangham:

  That's right, Judy.

  Flight 5735 took off normally. But about an hour into the flight, once it was at cruising altitude, the jet plunged, dropping over 20,000 feet in just about a minute. At about 8,000 feet, there was a brief change, but then it plunged again.

  This video which was shared by the China Aviation Review seems to show the near-vertical descent of the jet just before impact.

  Joining me now is our science correspondent, Miles O'Brien, who has covered aviation for many years. And he is also a pilot.

  Miles, thank you so much for being here.

  I mean, this is such — what it seems to be an awful event. I can't imagine for those 130 something people to have been on that plane at such a steep descent before it crashed.

  Can you walk us through the things that the investigators are now going to be looking through to try to figure out what happened?

• Miles O’Brien:

  Sure, William.

  There are three major categories that investigators focus on as they approach an accident investigation like this. It's the machine itself, the aircraft, the flight crew, and the weather.

  Let's talk about the aircraft for just a moment. It is really important to say at the outset that this is not a 737 MAX, the plane now notorious for two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. Ultimately, that was a redesign of the aircraft that led to some bad software which led to those crashes.

  This is a previous version of the 737, so we will take that whole issue off the plate.

  The crew itself, we don't know much about what was going on in that cockpit. There is no indication of any sort of radio call, any announcement that there was a mayday scenario. The weather does not appear to be a factor.

  The crash site itself is very contained, which indicates that the aircraft was not breaking apart in pieces in flight. The wreckage is pretty much in one spot. So that leaves investigators scratching their head and looking for the clues.

  One thing to point out here, at that rate of speed, 350 to 400 miles an hour straight into the ground, there is a high likelihood we won't get any data out of the cockpit voice recorder or the flight data recorder, which would be very unfortunate, of course.

• William Brangham:

  That incredibly steep descent that you're describing would seem like a near vertical drop into the ground.

  Is that something that the plane could have done or would have done on its own?

• Miles O’Brien:

  No. Planes are inherently stable, William. That — what you saw would take really an awful lot of effort.

  Let's go back to 1997, the 737 crash, SilkAir out of Jakarta, Indonesia, almost an identical precipitous plunge. Many years later, the NTSB came to the conclusion, after studying it in great detail, because they wanted to make sure there wasn't a mechanical problem with the 737 rudder, which had caused some problems and some crashes previously.

  They looked at it and they could not come up with a scenario where they could maintain that kind of a precipitous fall without human intervention. In other words, if you let go the controls, the plane would have reduced its descent dramatically and would have returned to a more stable flight.

• William Brangham:

  We know that Boeing and the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, have offered assistance to the Chinese in this investigation. It's unclear whether that offer will be accepted.

  But, generally speaking, do we know — what kind of a track record do the Chinese have when it comes to aviation security?

• Miles O’Brien:

  Much improved.

  In the 1990s, you may recall, William, China aviation was not good. It had not a good track record. Hundreds of people had died in that time frame in a series of accidents. The Chinese turned to the United States and the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board to ask those officials how to improve their system.

  And they embraced that, by all accounts, and adopted a very meticulous safety program, which kind of matched the FAA-NTSB approach. And concurrent with that, they improved and modernize their fleet dramatically. This 737 that crashed yesterday was only 6 years old. Pretty common in China to have that new fleet.

  So China aviation generally is a safe enterprise. It will be very interesting to see how forthcoming and how welcoming the Chinese officials might be to representatives of Boeing, for example, the FAA and the NTSB, which, by treaty, are invited into these investigations because that is, after all, where the aircraft was produced.

• William Brangham:

  And it seems also, if this is a Chinese-made manufacture, there's a certain conflict of interest there in the investigation going forward.

• Miles O’Brien:

  Yes, it's very much a gray area how this is going to go forward.

  And here's the important thing to remember. China owns the airline, and the investigation will be led by the government. So there's an inherent conflict of interest here.

• William Brangham:

  All right, Miles O'Brien, thanks for getting us through all of this.

• Miles O’Brien:

  You're welcome, William.