The Boeing 737-800 NG, the model that crashed in China on Monday, is a workhorse of the skies. There are nearly 25,000 passenger planes in service worldwide, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider. Of those, about 4,200, or 17 percent, are Boeing 737-800 NGs. China is home to nearly 1,200 of those planes, followed by Europe, with nearly 1,000, and the United States, with nearly 800. American Airlines has 265 737-800 NGs in service, while Southwest Airlines has 205, United Airlines has 136 and Delta Air Lines has 77,…
Month: March 2022
China Eastern Flight Crashes With 132 Aboard
Advertisement A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board crashed in a remote mountainous area of southern China on Monday, officials said, setting off a forest fire visible from space in the country’s worst air disaster in nearly a decade. More than seven hours after communication was lost with the plane, there was still no word of survivors. The Civil Aviation Administration of China said in a statement the crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region. The flight was traveling from Kunming in the…
Chinese plane with 132 people onboard crashes in Guangxi province
A passenger plane carrying 132 people has crashed in southern China, with no survivors announced so far, Chinese authorities have reported. The China Eastern Airlines plane departed Kunming at 1pm, on route to Guangzhou. At about 2.20pm, according to data from Flightradar24, the plane, a Boeing 737, plummeted more than 20,000 feet in just over a minute. It then seems to have regained altitude momentarily, before dropping rapidly again. The plane crashed near the city of Wuzhou in Teng County, Guangxi province. The Civil Aviation Administration said it had activated…
China Eastern: Plane carrying 132 people crashes in Guangxi mountains
Flight tracking sites report the plane was in the air for just over an hour, and was nearing its destination when it went down in Wuzhou, a verdant, mountainous area prone to mixed weather at this time of year as China enters its annual flood season. BBC
As Omicron Surges and Economy Suffers, China Tweaks ‘Zero Covid’
When the coronavirus first swept across China in early 2020, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, declared a “people’s war” against the epidemic, launching what would become a no-holds-barred strategy to eliminate infections. Now, in year three of the pandemic, and faced with the rise of a stealthy and rapidly spreading variant, Mr. Xi is trying to fine-tune the playbook, ordering officials to quash outbreaks — but also to limit the economic pain involved. As China grapples with the country’s largest outbreak since the pandemic began in Wuhan more than two…
China has fully militarized three islands in South China Sea, US admiral says
China has fully militarized at least three of several islands it built in the disputed South China Sea, arming them with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems, laser and jamming equipment and fighter jets in an increasingly aggressive move that threatens all nations operating nearby, a top US military commander said Sunday. US Indo-Pacific commander Admiral John C Aquilino said the hostile actions were in stark contrast to the Chinese president Xi Jinping’s past assurances that Beijing would not transform the artificial islands in contested waters into military bases. The efforts…
Omicron vs Zero-Covid: How long can China hold on?
Hong Kong, which was previously almost untouched by the virus, is now seeing 30,000 cases and more than 200 deaths a day. The city’s healthcare system has been overrun, with shocking images of people in need of hospital care receiving rudimentary treatment outside medical facilities. BBC
Chinese article urging country to cut ties with Putin gets 1m views
When an essay from a prominent Shanghai scholar suggested China needed to cut ties with Vladimir Putin as soon as possible over the Ukraine war, the online reaction was swift. Despite being published late on a Friday evening in the Carter Center’s US-China Perception Monitor, Hu Wei’s essay soon gained a million views in and outside China, and was republished into Chinese blogs, non-official media sites and social media accounts. Then came the backlash, as the article was criticised for being “reckless and dangerous” vitriol. Personal attacks on Hu and…
Is Taiwan Next?
A fragile peace Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has amplified fears that the world is teetering back to a Cold War-like era in which the most powerful countries compete for dominance. That could mean not only Russia exerting control over Eastern Europe but also China imposing itself over East and Southeast Asia — particularly Taiwan. China has laid claim to Taiwan since the island split off from the mainland in 1949 and has threatened to forcibly reunite the two. It views the issue as a top priority: Days after Russia’s invasion,…
Ukraine crisis: claims Mariupol women and children forcibly sent to Russia
Authorities in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol have said Russian troops have forcibly deported several thousand residents to Russia, as claims emerged that the besieged city had been “wiped off the face of the earth”. “Over the past week, several thousand Mariupol residents were deported on to the Russian territory,” the city council said in a statement on its Telegram channel late on Saturday. “The occupiers illegally took people from the Livoberezhniy district and from the shelter in the sports club building, where more than a thousand people (mostly women…