Relatives, friends and colleagues of passengers on a China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed into mountains on Monday have gathered at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport to hear any news about the disaster.
Flight MU5735, with 132 people on board, had been scheduled to arrive at Baiyun en route from Kunming in Yunnan province on Monday afternoon but crashed after a sudden descent from cruising altitude. Local media said there were no signs of survivors.
The airline said it deeply mourned the passengers and crew, without specifying how many people had been killed.
Around a dozen people waited in an area cordoned off for relatives of passengers who had been on the flight.
One man, surnamed Yan, said that one of his colleagues, Mr. Tan, had been on board the flight.
“When we first heard about this news, our company asked all our colleagues and clients to call the mobile phone of Mr. Tan, and we called for a few hours and it never went through. Then we suspected he was on the plane,” he told Reuters.
He then had to inform his colleague’s distraught family, he said
“They were sobbing, his mother didn’t believe this had happened to her boy who was only 29 years old.”
Tan, was a regional manager of the Foshan-based building materials company.
Arrangements were being made for relatives to travel to Wuzhou, close to the crash site, on Tuesday, Yan said.
Chinese media showed brief highway video footage from a vehicle’s dashcam apparently showing a jet diving to the ground behind trees at an angle of about 35 degrees off vertical.
Reuters could not immediately verify the footage.
The airline said it had provided a hotline for relatives of those on board and sent a working group to the site.
Media cited a rescue official as saying the plane had disintegrated and caused a fire destroying bamboo trees.
The People’s Daily quoted a provincial firefighting department official as saying there was no sign of life among the debris.
