Rescue work is underway in Tengxian county,South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on March 21, 2022 after the air crash. Photo: VCG

As of 3:30pm on Thursday, a total of 21 possessions of the victims, 183 pieces of plane wreckage and some of the human remains of the victims had been found and handed over to the investigation team, according to the latest press conference on Thursday afternoon related to the crash of China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735.

The main impact point of the Boeing 737 crash has been basically determined, said the press conference, noting that most of the wreckage is concentrated in a core area with a radius of about 30 meters around the main impact point, and the depth extends about 20 meters under the surface.

The main debris recovered includes engine blade and turbine fragments, engine pylon fragments, left and right horizontal tail fragments, aileron autopilot actuators and wing fragments with partial wing-tip winglets, and crew escape ropes and crew manual fragments, as well as some crew certificates found in the cockpit. 

Investigators are still at the crash site to continue the investigation and evidence collection, as the next step to find the cause of the accident.

Search and rescue personnel at a farmland in Tengxian county, Wuzhou found a suspected piece of debris with a length of about 1.3 meters and a maximum width of about 10 centimeters, which was about more than 10 kilometers from the accident core site.

The search area on Thursday is estimated to be 1.5 times larger than on the previous day, according to the press conference.

But the continuous rainfall has increased difficulties for the search work as it caused water accumulation in the core area of the accident. Local fire brigade officials also warned of the risk of small-scale landslides, adding that the it is even more difficult to access the area after the rain, and large fire rescue vehicles and equipment cannot be used.

The Guangxi fire and rescue department, armed police department and the public security organs have sent 1,618 people to carry out search and rescue work in designated areas. Search and rescue workers carried safety ropes, life detectors, metal detectors and other equipment to expand the search area outside of the core area of the accident.

As of 8 am on Thursday, there were a total of 305 family members of 56 passengers staying in Wuzhou, involving 52 families, according to the press conference.

One of the crashed Boeing 737's black boxes that was found on Wednesday was transferred to the decoding lab in Beijing on Wednesday night, and the data download and analysis of the black box is underway.

The possibility of damage to the stored data cannot be ruled out.

In response to media reports saying that US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday that Chinese authorities had invited the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to take part in the investigation, an official of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said at the press conference that after the incident, the CAAC reported the accident information to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the NTSB, the investigation body of the country where the crashed plane was designed, in accordance with the relevant requirements of the ICAO.

The current focus is still on search and rescue, and collecting evidence for the upcoming accident investigation, said an official of the CAAC at the press conference. For the probe stage, we will invite relevant parties to participate in it in accordance with regulations, said the official.

Buttigieg noted that he was very encouraged by the invitation to be on the ground in China. The NTSB, however, later said it had not yet determined if investigators would travel to China in light of visa and quarantine requirements, Reuters reported.

A spokesperson of China Eastern said at the press conference that the maintenance costs of the carrier in 2021 were increased by 12 percent from 2019, even though the number of flights had decreased due to the epidemic, refuting earlier media reports that the carrier cut its maintenance costs.