“Very unusual” behavior of the plane before it crashed in China

High-altitude booth followed by severe fall before impact: China Eastern’s Boeing 737 showed “extremely unusual” behavior before it crashed Monday with 132 people on board, a flight safety specialist notes.

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Jean-Paul Treddick, former director of the Bureau of Civil Aviation Safety Investigation and Analysis (BEA), stressed that it was “too early” to draw conclusions, just hours after the disaster involving a type of aircraft that was widely used and considered. Reliable, in a country where flight safety is “excellent”.

“On the Flightradar website, we see that the plane, which was at a cruising altitude (about 9000 meters above sea level, according to the editor), suddenly dived about 600 km / h towards the ground before crashing. It is very unusual, one booth will not give this Kind of profile at all.

Let’s imagine we are stopped at a high altitude, at which point the pilot dives a little to regain speed, and the plane slowly resumes its flight. These are maneuvers that we learn in the first hours of flying lessons. High altitude booth, it catches up very well. There, it’s something else.

It could have been the autopilot who would have ordered a sudden landing which was not caught by the crew, which seems a bit surprising considering the duration of the fall, which is three minutes, and it could also have been the doing of the crew, but nothing can be said another thing “.

“The Chinese have a very competent investigative office, they should be able very quickly to recover the flight recorders (data and audio, editor’s note) that usually survived this shock, and from there, not only to accurately reconstruct the course, but also the parameters of the aircraft, the conversations of the pilots, And all the actions that may have been performed on the controls … this should be figured out very quickly.

Personally, I have never in my career encountered this kind of event, it is too early to draw conclusions.

“I’ve never heard of any particular problem with this model of aircraft, it is derived from a very old Boeing 737, but we have installed modern engines on it. The aircraft has not undergone the same kind of development in flight controls as the MAX (at the source of both incidents, editor’s note ).

As for the security level of China’s civil aviation, it is very excellent.”