More than four years after a China Eastern Airlines Boeing jet plunged from an altitude of 9 kilometers, crashed into a mountain in southern China and killed all 132 people on board, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has determined that someone in the cockpit intentionally cut off fuel to the engines.
According to data released by the NTSB, the crash appears to have been the result of a murder-suicide following a struggle in the cockpit, and Chinese authorities knew from the outset that the pilot had deliberately crashed the plane.
It was China’s deadliest air disaster in decades, but the Civil Aviation Administration of China has refused, and still refuses, to address questions about the circumstances of the March 2022 crash. Examination of the plane’s black box found that two pilots struggled with each other after one of them manually and simultaneously shut off the fuel switches to both engines, before the Boeing 737-800 fell from the sky.
One of the two black boxes stopped recording when the plane’s generators lost power and did not capture the final moments before the crash, but the second black box continued recording on battery backup. It was recovered from the wreckage and sent to the NTSB laboratory in Washington, which became involved in the investigation because Boeing, the aircraft’s manufacturer, is an American company.
“It was found that while cruising at 29,000 feet, the fuel switches in both engines moved from the run position to the cutoff position. Engine speeds decreased after the fuel switch movement,” the NTSB report said. Fuel switches on commercial aircraft are physical controls that regulate fuel flow to the engines. On a Boeing 737, a pilot must pull the switch upward before moving it from run to cutoff.
The China Eastern Airlines flight crashed on March 24, 2022, in the Guangxi autonomous region of southern China. Two months later, The Wall Street Journal reported that information retrieved from the aircraft’s flight data recorder showed that human commands sent the plane into its fatal dive. “The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” the paper quoted a source in the U.S. investigation as saying.
Speculation that the crash was part of a pilot suicide plan was denied by China. In its initial report, the CAAC said the flight crew and attendants had rested sufficiently and had passed health checks on the day of the flight. China has not published an update on its investigation since 2024, when it said it had found no problems with the aircraft, crew or weather conditions. In the face of public anger, the CAAC said last summer that “publishing the causes of the crash could endanger national security and social stability.”
Crash of Air India Flight 171 in June 2025
Beijing is now under pressure from international aviation organizations to disclose the findings of its investigation into the disaster, which appears to have followed a pattern similar to pilot murder-suicides that have killed hundreds since 2014. The most recent was Air India Flight 171, which crashed in June 2025 in Ahmedabad and killed 260 people. A preliminary investigation found that the engines were manually shut off shortly after takeoff for London. The final report on that disaster is expected to be published next month.
Deliberate pilot action is also a leading theory in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in 2014. The Boeing jet, with 239 people on board, crashed into the Indian Ocean after six hours of flying off its planned route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with no radio or radar transmissions. To this day, no remains of the aircraft have been found except for small floating debris.
In October 2023, Joe Emerson, an off-duty pilot sitting in the cockpit of an Alaska Airlines flight, tried to shut down both engines during the flight. He claimed he was under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug and was sentenced last year to probation.