The black box of the crashed flight has been found, what is the focus of the aftermath?

On March 29, 2022, the rescue operation of the "3-21" China Eastern Airlines Mu5735 aircraft flight accident entered its ninth day, and rescuers are still at the scene of the search work. According to the report, the main task of the fire rescue team is to search for the remains of the victims and the wreckage of the aircraft.

On the afternoon of March 21, Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 was on a Kunming-Guangzhou mission when it was lost and crashed over Vine County, Wuzhou City, Guangxi. There were 123 passengers and 9 crew members on board. After six days of full search and rescue, on the evening of March 26, the National Emergency Response Command confirmed that all the people on the flight had been killed.

In addition, on the 3rd and 7th day of the search and rescue, staff have found the two black boxes (cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder) of the crashed flight respectively and sent them to Beijing for decoding overnight.

"There are two time points that are critical, one is the official announcement that all the people involved in the crash were killed, and the second is that both black boxes were found, which means that the most urgent and important emergency response rescue phase of the task has been completed, and in a sense these are two landmark points in the emergency rescue and aftercare phase of the accident." Professor Lu Wengang, an expert in emergency management for safety production in Guangdong province and president of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Emergency Management Promotion Association at Jinan University, told Interface News.

He said that due to the catastrophic nature of such aviation accidents, they often essentially enter the aftercare phase once they occur, so the rescue and disposal and aftercare work are actually close to being synchronised, and "have now undoubtedly entered the aftercare phase".

What needs to be done in the aftermath? The first is to continue the search for wreckage and remains of the victims, a basic principle is to collect as comprehensive and detailed as possible, the fuller and more comprehensive the better, do not rule out new discoveries in the process, the location of the wreckage fragments for accurate labeling, but also help in the investigation of the cause of the accident and the event review more accurate and comprehensive analysis. At the same time, the collection of the victims' relics will also serve as a consolation to the families of the victims.

Zhu Tao, the aviation safety ombudsman and director of the aviation safety office of the Civil Aviation Administration, previously introduced at the ninth press conference of the accident that as of 12:00 on March 28, searchers had made a total of 15,640 trips, with a cumulative search area of about 370,000 square meters and 36,001 pieces of aircraft wreckage and debris found.

The mayor of Wuzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region People's Government, Zhong Changzhi, introduced at the meeting that the remains and relics of the victims are currently being properly stored by the Wuzhou City Funeral Hall and will be carried out in accordance with the relevant regulations and in accordance with the law.

The victims' compensation claims were also officially launched, and on the afternoon of March 27, Liu Xiaodong, head of the publicity department of the China Eastern Airlines Group, said at a press conference that it would fully respect the reasonable demands of the families in accordance with the relevant national laws and regulations, communicate with them about the details of the scheme, develop a compensation plan and determine a unified compensation standard.