THE SEARCH FOR clues into why a passenger jet suddenly dived and crashed into a mountain in southern China was suspended as rain soaked the debris field and filled the red-dirt gash formed by the plane’s fiery impact.

Earlier today, searchers used hand tools, drones and sniffer dogs in rainy conditions to comb the heavily forested slopes for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, as well as any human remains.

Crews also worked to pump water from the pit created when the plane hit the ground, but their efforts were suspended mid-morning because small landslides were possible on the steep, slick slopes.

Video clips posted by China’s state media showed small pieces of the Boeing 737-800 scattered over the area.

Each piece of debris had a number next to it, the larger ones marked off by police tape.

Mud-stained wallets, bank and identity cards have been recovered.

China Eastern flight 5735 was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew from Kunming in Yunnan province to Guangzhou, an industrial centre on China’s south-eastern coast, when it crashed on Monday afternoon outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region. All 132 people on board are presumed dead.

Investigators say it is too early to speculate on the cause. The plane went into an unexplained dive an hour after departure and stopped transmitting data 96 seconds into the fall.

An air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply but got no reply, Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said at a news conference yesterday evening.

“As of now, the rescue has yet to find survivors,” Zhu said. “The public security department has taken control of the site.”

China Eastern is based in Shanghai and is one of China’s three largest carriers with more than 600 planes, including 109 Boeing 737-800s.

China’s transport ministry said China Eastern has grounded all of its 737-800s, a move that could further disrupt domestic air travel already curtailed because of the largest Covid-19 outbreak in China since the initial peak in early 2020.

The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has a well-established safety record. It is an earlier model than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.

Monday’s crash was China’s worst in more than a decade.

In August 2010, an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the north-eastern city of Yichun and caught fire.

It carried 96 people and 44 of them died. Investigators blamed pilot error.