It seems pretty hard for a commercial airliner to go from cruise to nosedive accidentally.

The video of it (allegedly) coming down vertical and fast is horrifying. I hope the people in it were long passed out and unconscious .

From one of the tweets below - assuming it is true given what we saw in that original video

According to flight FlightRadar24 data the aircraft fell from 29100 ft to ground level in two and a half minutes.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

News reports say it was a 737-800.

But, I wonder, are those in error? Was it a 737 max ?

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No it wasn't a Max.

Any mention of what the MSL altitude was at impact ?

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That would be incredibly unfortunate.

I wonder, if this was indeed a murder/suicide type event (hope not, but it is possible), how will China's super controlled state media react to this?

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If you're interested in aviation buffs commenting and arguing about the possible cause, you can head over to the Aviation Herald. https://avherald.com/...e=4f64be2f&opt=0

Hey, thanks for the link.

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Advanced Aero TopTube Storage for Road, Gravel, & Tri...ZeroSlip & Direct-mount, made in the USA.
DarkSpeedWorks.com.....Reviews.....Insta.....Facebook
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the video i saw wasn't great resolution, but it almost looked like it was in freefall. when i read that it came in "vertical" i assumed that was figurative, but it was honestly perpendicular to the horizon. i've never seen anything like it.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

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There is another angle where it's 75-80 degrees (I guess the angle of the viewer vis a vis the descent alters the appearance of the trajectory), but it's shocking either way.

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"Are you sure we're going fast enough?" - Emil Zatopek

There are maybe two good posts in that thread, but, man, they're overall no better than we are here. Like 3-4 comments about the "Max" when it wasn't a Max, then a bunch more comments telling those people to STFU.

Yeh scary as heck. I heard a report that it levelled out briefly after part of its descent and then angled sharply down again. It looks like somebody in flight crew flew the plane into the ground.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

There's been a few crashes with planes hitting terrain at a very steep pitch, but I'm struggling to think of one where it's been pretty much vertical. Even the complete failure/loss of the horizontal stabilisers wouldn't cause this. I'm thinking pilot suicide. The g=forces would have been immense, the passengers would most likely have been unconscious.

Sure, at impact. The g-forces during the dive itself probably wouldn't be so -- the passengers may have even experienced weightlessness for some of it.

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"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."

Awful way to go.

Exactly, a dive does not have much g force, well until you have to pull out or the plane breaks apart due to overspeed and starts tumbling.

I think the ValueJet plane went mostly vertical into the everglades.

Yup, you're right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAPSdNAeGx4


Looks to be slightly inverted, similar to the Alaskan Airlines flight 261 which was a failure of the horizontal stabilisers.

Haha, all forums are the same, why aren’t they allowed to mention that “popular plane tracking website”?! Is that their TTSTTTF?

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"Are you sure we're going fast enough?" - Emil Zatopek

As soon as I saw that footage I was thinking that's a catastrophic failure in the tail rather than a pilot initiated suicide etc.....
But hey I am probably just as bad as all the people on the aviation forums!

I'm hearing rumors that it might have been a failure from a crack in the "pickle fork" component that connects the wings to the fuselage. Boeing had grounded a number of 737s in 2019 for this reason. I've heard that the Chinese tried to fix it themselves on this particular jet. However, if a wing was torn off, that would have resulted in an inflight breakup and thats not something that we are seeing as the plane seemed to have crashed intact.

When I first started reading about this particular accident, my first thought was JAL Flight 123 that crashed in 1985. Its rear bulkhead had not been repaired properly causing the tail to rip off and the loss of the hydraulic system. Perhaps it could have been something similar on Flight 5735.

Not only that, this model is insanely safe.

http://www.airsafe.com/.../models/rate_mod.htm

It’s basically one of two models that have over 100m flights and still have basically the lowest accident rate.

The only planes lower are the 747-400 and the Embraer e170. Don’t know much about the Embraer.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/...om-cockpit-drnsl5f3f

Black box indicates human at the controls with deliberate inputs.

A pilot or an intruder deliberately forced a China Eastern airliner into a dive, causing the crash in March that killed all 132 people aboard, according to American officials.

The crew made no radio calls and no emergency code was transmitted from the radar transponder. Pilots signal emergencies or hijacking by “squawking” special radar codes.