A heavy heart and deep sadness

Tragic loss: Grieving relatives arriving at the site where China Eastern flight MU5735 crashed on March 21, near Wuzhou, in southwestern China’s Guangxi province. — AFP

THE afternoon of March 21 was the darkest day in China’s aviation history in over a decade.

A commercial plane with 123 passengers and nine crew members plunged into a remote mountainous area just outside of Wuzhou city in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.Among the passengers were a deaf mother and her husband, who had taken their 18-month-old daughter to see a doctor for her congenital branchial cyst. It was the family’s first air travel trip.