Investigation of the Crash Process of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735 Based on Seismic Data

Abstract Investigating aircraft accidents is a critical and challenging endeavor in the field of aviation safety. Current practices in seismology-based air accident investigations focus on locating crash sites to aid in the search and recovery of missing aircraft. In this study, we conducted an analysis of the China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737–800 crash on 21 March 2022, by leveraging three-component seismic records acquired from a location 21 km away from the crash site, in conjunction with publicly available radar data from Flightradar24 (an online service). Our approach helps to reconstruct the flight state of the aircraft at the time of the impact by modeling the dynamics of the impact with the Earth’s surface. Through an inversion process, we successfully obtained the force–time function and determined the direction of the impact force. In addition, we conducted inquiries into the weight of the 737–800 airliner, which enabled us to estimate the speed of the aircraft at the time of the accident to be about 200–264 m/s using the momentum theorem. These results are in agreement with time of the last radar signal and the measured dive angle of the airplane, providing valuable insights into the circumstances surrounding the crash.