China Eastern Grounds Boeing Planes After a Deadly Crash

A China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 plane takes off (Flickr)

China Eastern Airlines grounded its entire fleet of Boeing 737-800 aircraft following  a crash in the mountains of southern China on March 21. The aircraft carried 132 passengers, the Wall Street Journal reported. China showed its determination to find the cause of the crash while, according to Reuters, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chose a senior safety investigator to help with the investigation.

Rescuers have not found any survivors of the crash. Bloomberg News reported that the pilots of the aircraft failed to respond to several calls from Chinese air-traffic controllers after the plane started a deadly nosedive.

The plane crash comes at a time of turbulent U.S.-China relations that began with the 2018 trade war and was fueled by China’s increasingly aggressive moves in the South China Sea. Per Reuters, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a quick investigation to find the cause of the crash according to the state broadcaster CCTV. Furthermore, China’s state media reported that China Eastern grounded its  entire fleet of Boeing 737-800 aircrafts even though it is unusual to do so when there is insufficient evidence of problems with the model, according to aviation experts.

China’s quick response to this disaster harkens to its response to the 2018 and 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crashes. According to The Wall Street Journal, the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed 346 people, leading to the worldwide grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircrafts. After these incidents, China was the first to ground the plane even as western safety officials did not due to insufficient evidence. The U.S. reapproved the MAX for flight in late 2020, while China only did so in December last year, per the New York Times

The Boeing 737-800, one of the most popular airplanes for short and medium length flights, has an “excellent safety record,” said the president of the Flight Safety Foundation. The New York Times reported that many industry analysts and experts hesitate to attribute this accident to a fundamental design flaw. Nevertheless, Boeing’s shares fell by 3.6 percent during trading in New York following news of the crash, per the Seattle Times. Boeing said that it stands ready to assist China Eastern Airlines and it has contacted the NTSB, per Reuters. Further, Reuters found that the agency appointed a senior safety investigator as the U.S. representative for the investigation.

According to TheWall Street Journal, China has represented an important market for Boeing, as Chinese companies have purchased 1,736 of its jets. However, Boeing’s business in China has faced challenges over the past few years due to deteriorating U.S.-China relations, the grounding of the 737 MAX, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. All of these issues have resulted in no new orders for Boeing jets from China in over four years.