Boeing 737 plane crashes in China with 132 people on board

A plane with 132 people onboard crashed in China on Monday, the country’s Civil Aviation Administration said.

The crash sparked a mountainside fire in the southern region of Guangxi, state media reported. There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash or numbers of any dead or injured.

The Boeing 737 belonging to China Eastern Airlines lost contact over Wuzhou during a flight between the southern cities of Kunming and Guangzhou, according to the aviation administration. The 132 people on board included 123 passengers and nine crew members, it said.

Rescuers were dispatched to the crash site, state-owned CCTV reported. The aviation administration said it sent a working group to the scene.

The flight, MU5735, left Kunming at 1:11 p.m. (1:11 a.m. ET), with a scheduled arrival time less than two hours later, according to data from flight-tracking website FlightRadar24. It showed the Boeing 737-89P rapidly lost speed after 2:20 p.m. local time (2:20 a.m. ET) before entering a sharp descent.

Satellite data from NASA showed a massive fire in the area where the plane went down at the time of the crash.

China Eastern is one of China’s largest airlines, carrying more than 130 million passengers a year, according to its website. It has a fleet of 730 aircraft.