March 21, 2022. China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 crashed in Wuzhou, Guanagxi, China killing all 123 passengers and 9 crew members on board.
It’s rare that planes crash, much less everyday. So when the public hears of a plane crash, we are intrigued to know what happened. We always hope for survivors and send our condolences to the families affected. Just recently this horrific tragedy that occurred on March 21, 2022 immediately made headlines in the news all across the world. Flight 5735 took off at 13:15 CST and shortly lost contact with the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). At 14:22 CST, it was reported that flight 5735 nosedived into the mountainous region of Teng County in Wuzhou, Guangxi, China. Found all over the news are pictures and videos of the crash site. Even one individual was able to catch the plane in a nosedive toward the Earth. Along with this video there is an ongoing investigation happening at the crash site. The question on everyone’s mind is “What Happened?” Was there a defect in the aircraft or was it pilot error?
This article started out with only one sentence “On March 21, 2022, a China Eastern Airlines plane crashed in China.” being only 67 bytes big. But as more people contributed and revised this Wikipedia article, the byte size of this article also increased. As of now, this article’s size is capped at 41,881 bytes with over 1,400 revisions made (1,407 to be approximate) and 353 unique editors. It’s clear to see that this article is constantly being updated and revised with the very first edit being 2022–03–21 and the most recent edit being 2022–03–30. This Wikipedia article has been translated into 32 languages to be readily available by many. March 21st is when the article had the most page views of over 155,000 (155,532 to be exact). Since then, the amount of page views has significantly declined to the ten thousands. However, in time I expect to see an increase with page views as more questions are answered and more information to become yet available.
In the graph above, it’s clear to see that there is a positive relationship between the article size and the number of revisions. This makes sense because as more revisions are made; as more people contribute to this article the longer it gets and therefore the article size (in bytes) increases.
There is a negative relationship between time and page views. After each day that goes by, the page views for the article “China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735” decreases. The day of the crash is obvious to have the most amount of page views. The second day is also popular with having a lot of page views as probably millions of people did not hear about the crash until the day after. I believe there is some lag time in page views because of the time difference of China compared to other parts of the world. For example, in Denver, Colorado we are 14 hours behind Guangxi, China. There are also a bunch of other countries, states, and nations behind China. So it makes sense that March 22, 2022 is the second day that has the most amount of page views. In fact, when the plane crashed at 14:22 CST, it was night time in America and most Americans were probably sleeping. By March 23rd, the news about this terrible plane crash had reached all around the world. This is shown on the graph as the point 2022–03–23 significantly decreased from 2022–03–22, and then by the third day page views had really plummeted from the day of the crash.
With each day that goes by, there are hopes that more questions will be answered. The CAAC are still conducting an investigation. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States and Boeing have both been made aware of this incident. China Eastern Airline has grounded all its Boeing 737–800 fleets for inspection until the investigation of the crash is completed. Also as a result of this crash, Boeing shares have dropped in the U.S. stock markets as well as in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Boeing is continuously offering its condolences to the families of the victims and is in current contact with China Eastern and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) of the United States. More information yet to come is TBD.