Analysis: The China Eastern plane crash that killed 132 was an anomaly given the country’s strong safety record

Here are where it happened.

The flight MU5735 was scheduled to take off at 1:11 p.m. local time from Kunming en route to Guangzhou, a trip that this plane had made at least 66 times in the past year.

But during the cruise phase of flights, it suddenly began a rapid descent, losing about 25,900 feet within two minutes. Although there was a slight recover when reaching 7,425 feet, the plane kept falling, until crashed in Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The nation hasn’t seen a fatal commercial airline crash accident in a decade. The last plane crash happened in Yichun in 2010, when a airplane struck terrain while landing with poor visibility in radiation fog. 44 out of 96 people on board died.

The last crash with no single survivor can be dated back to 2004, with death toll of 55 (53 on board and 2 on the ground).

In all the plane accident records collected by The Aviation Safety Network, there are 153 fatal plane cases.

Among them, only 40.5% of them have involved with average passengers.

This bar chart shows fatalities and survivors in each 5-year-period. #It supposed to highlight different parts but somehow I failed. Need some debugging!

Most civil aviation incidents happened before the founding of People’s Republic China, when very few Chinese people can afford the plane tickets and the worldwide plane accidents rate is high;

and after the Reform and Opening policy, when more people are willing to fly but the civil aviation operation system has not been mature yet.

In the 1990s the International Airline Passengers Association has labeled China as one of the most dangerous places in the world to fly.

The deadliest airplane crash ever in China's history was in 1994, with 146 passengers and 14 crew members died.

But in 21st century, there are only eight fatal accidents, despite the huge spike of the total passengers, from less than 100 million in 2000 to 660 million in 2019.