Probe into fatal China Eastern plane crash points to deliberate fuel cut-off

The China Eastern Airlines jetliner that plummeted into a hillside in 2022, killing all 132 people on board, had its fuel supply cut mid-flight, newly released investigative material shows, bolstering 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 US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in May show that levers controlling the flow of fuel to the jet’s engines were switched to the “cut-off” position while the Boeing 737 aircraft was at a cruising altitude of 8,839m.

This would have immediately cut off the fuel supply to the engines, forcing them to shut down.

“Engine speeds decreased after the fuel switch movement,” the NTSB, which supported the Chinese authorities in the crash probe, said in the 2022 report, released on May 1 under the Freedom of Information Act.

Bloomberg News and other media outlets have previously reported that preliminary evidence pointed to a murder-suicide scenario, but no official information on the possible causes has been disclosed. 

The 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 e-mail seeking comment. Boeing did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Mr Neil Campbell, a former air safety investigator at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau who worked on the 2018 Boeing 737 Max crash in Indonesia, said it is 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 Mr Campbell. 

The movement of fuel control switches has also been at the centre 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 has not 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 161km 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. BLOOMBERG