Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday extended his condolences to Chinese President Xi Jinping after the fall of a China Eastern Boeing 737-800 plane in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi, with 133 people on board, the worst civil air disaster recorded in the Asian country since 2010.
“Please accept our deepest condolences for the deaths of the passengers and crew members of the plane flying from Kunming (southwest) and Guangzhou (southeast),” the Russian leader said in a telegram posted on the Kremlin’s website.
Putin noted that “Russia shares the pain of those who lost family and friends in this tragedy.”
The head of the Russian government, Mikhail Mishustin, also joined in the condolences in a message sent to his Chinese counterpart, Li Qequiang, in which he expressed that Russia “shares the sorrow and pain of the friendly people of China.”
The damaged flight MU5735, which had taken off at 1:15 p.m. local time (5:15 GMT), crashed to the ground in the Guangxi region (south) without further details being known at the moment, according to local media reports on Monday.
Rescue teams went to the scene, adds the Chinese state chain, according to which the accident caused a forest fire in the Teng county of the city of Wuzhou, in Guangxi.
The flight had an expected duration of one hour and forty minutes, in which the device, almost seven years old, had to travel the 1,357 kilometers that separate Kunming from Canton.
According to data from the FlightRadar24 flight tracking portal, the aircraft was flying at 2:19 p.m. local time (06:19 GMT) at an altitude of 29,100 feet (8,870 meters) when, about 55 kilometers west of the town of Wuzhou, it began to descend.
The last point of contact of the flight, according to the aforementioned portal, was about 25 kilometers southwest of Wuzhou, at an altitude of 3,225 feet (989 meters), at 2:22 p.m. local time (06:22 GMT), which would mean that in just three minutes the apparatus descended almost 8,000 meters. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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