Woman Stopped From Boarding Doomed Chinese Flight Due To Covid Rules

A woman due to board the China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed on Monday was stopped from getting on the plane due to Covid restrictions.

The Boeing 737-800 from Kunming to Guangzhou, China, plummeted more than 20,000 feet into the mountainous area of Guangxi.

There were said to be 132 people on board the plane and no survivors have been found from the crash.

Now reports have emerged of two citizens, a man and a woman, who for different reasons were forced to miss their flight.

A woman with the surname Xin missed her flight because she lived in a high-risk Covid area. She took a swab test and ended up rescheduling her journey to the following day.

She took to social media to share her thoughts about not boarding the doomed plane.

She said: "I'm in a complicated mood right now. My hands are shaking and I can't type.

"Thank you for your concern. I'm still in Yunnan, but I can't [fly] yet because I have a star [high-risk Covid-19 area] on my itinerary record."

Another man, aged 24 with the surname Huang, was also supposed to board the plane which was a replacement for a cancelled connecting flight, but said he changed his mind at the last minute and asked for a refund instead.

He said: "I didn't board the plane, the first flight was cancelled so I requested a refund."

Search crews are yet to find any survivors from the crash but have found one of the plane's two black boxes.

A Civil Aviation Administration of China official Zhu Tao said of the device in a media briefing: "An initial inspection showed that the exterior of the recorder has been severely damaged, but the storage units, while also damaged to some extent, are relatively complete."

The black box is being sent to Beijing for decoding but Tao noted the time this could take would depend on the extent of the damage.

Flight MU5735 was said to have crashed less than an hour before it's scheduled landing time.

It appeared to plummet to the ground at an angle of 35 degrees from vertical, as per the Guardian.

Searches have since been underway to look for survivors, but were halted by rainfall in southern China yesterday (23 March) due to the risk of landslides.

A man, known as Si, from a nearby village told Reuters that he heard a 'bang, bang' at the time of the crash and that 'it was like thunder'.

Police have established a checkpoint at Lu village, where several people were said to have gathered for a small Buddhist ceremony to pray for victims.

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