Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register BEIJING, April 17 (Reuters) – China Eastern Airlines (600115.SS) has begun resuming Boeing 737-800 commercial flights less than a month after an accident killed 132 people and led the company to take off 223 aircraft. , the airline said on Sunday. The airline said it had conducted systematic tests, structural inspections and verified airworthiness data for each of the aircraft and that test flights would be performed on all aircraft before resuming commercial services. The Boeing 737-800 aircraft with registration numbers close to the one that crashed on March 21 are still undergoing maintenance and evaluation checks, the company said in a statement to Reuters. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Flightradar24 data showed earlier in the day that China Eastern MU5843, operated by a three-year-old Boeing 737-800 aircraft, took off from the southwestern city of Kunming at 09:58 a.m. (0158 GMT) on Sunday and landed at 11:03 a.m. in Chengdu, also in southwest China. The aircraft, which completed a test flight on Saturday, later returned to Kunming, according to Flightradar24. Another Boeing 737-800 aircraft flew a test flight early Sunday in Shanghai, where China Eastern is based, according to Flightradar24. On March 21, MU5735 flight from Kunming to Guangzhou crashed in the Guangxi Mountains, killing 123 passengers and nine crew members in mainland China’s deadliest air disaster in 28 years. China has recovered both black boxes and said it would submit a preliminary report to the UN aviation authority ICAO within 30 days of the event. read more Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Stella Qiu and Ryan Woo. Edited by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Helen Popper Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
