The China Eastern Airlines Corp. jetliner that plummeted into a hillside in 2022, killing all 132 people on board, had its fuel supply cut during the flight, newly released investigative material shows, supporting the theory that the aircraft was intentionally brought down.
While China still has yet to release a final report on the accident, findings released by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board this month show that levers controlling the flow of fuel to the jet’s engines were switched to the “cutoff” position while the Boeing Co. 737 aircraft was at a cruising altitude of 29,000 feet. The movement would have immediately cut off fuel supply to the engines, forcing them to shut down.
“Engine speeds decreased after the fuel switch movement,” the NTSB, which supported Chinese authorities’ in the crash probe, said in the 2022 report, which was released May 1 under the Freedom of Information Act.
Bloomberg News and other media outlets have previously reported preliminary evidence pointed to a murder-suicide event, but no official information has previously been disclosed into the possible causes.
Chinese authorities have reportedly cited national security reasons for not releasing a final report. The Civil Aviation Administration of China did not respond to an email seeking comment. Boeing referred questions to CAAC.
Neil Campbell, a former air safety investigator at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said it’s routine for jet fuel switches to be turned off after the plane has landed, but almost never in flight, adding that the actions looked like a “deliberate event.”
“There’s no reason for switching the engines off, so that’s the bit that’s highly unusual,” said Campbell.
Read more: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Increasing Share of Aviation Fatalities
The movement of fuel control switches has also been at the center of an investigation into a 2025 crash of an Air India flight of a Boeing 787 jetliner that killed all but one person on board. A final report still hasn’t been released on that accident, but investigators are increasingly homing in on deliberate pilot action as the probable cause.
China Eastern Airlines flight 5735 was traveling from Kunming to Guangzhou on March 21, 2022 when it slammed into a forested hillside in China’s Guangxi region — about 100 miles from its destination.
The severity of the impact broke the plane into some 40,000 pieces. The cockpit voice and flight-data recorders survived the crash, despite sustaining heavy damage.
Photograph: In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, search and rescue workers search through debris at the China Eastern flight crash site in Tengxian County in southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on March 24, 2022. (Lu Boan/Xinhua via AP, File)
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