31 tourists from China’s mainland among passengers on tragic flight
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A TransAsia Airways plane with 58 passengers and crew on board careered into a river shortly after taking off from a downtown Taipei airport yesterday, killing at least 26 people, including six from China’s mainland, and leaving 17 missing, Taiwan officials said.
The plane’s two black boxes have been recovered, Xinhua news agency said.
Fifteen people survived the crash after the plane lurched between buildings, clipped a taxi and an overpass with its port-side wing and ended upside down in a shallow part of the Keelung River.
Dramatic pictures taken by a motorist and posted on Twitter showed the turboprop ATR 72-600 aircraft careening over the motorway soon after taking off in apparently clear weather on a domestic flight for the island of Kinmen.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” a volunteer rescuer surnamed Chen said of the most recent in a series of disasters to hit Asian carriers in the past 12 months.
Television footage showed survivors wearing life jackets wading and swimming clear of wreckage. Others, including a young child, were taken to shore in inflatable boats.
Emergency rescue officials crowded around the partially submerged fuselage of flight GE235, lying on its side in the river, trying to help those on board.
The plane missed apartment buildings by meters, though it was not clear if that was luck or whether the pilot was aiming for the river. Footage showed a van skidding to a halt on the damaged overpass after barely missing the plane’s wing, with small pieces of the aircraft scattered along the road.
The chief executive of TransAsia, Peter Chen, bowed deeply at a televised news conference as he apologized to passengers and crew.
The last communication from one of the aircraft’s pilots was “Mayday Mayday engine flameout,” according to an air traffic control recording on liveatc.net.
A flameout occurs when the fuel supply to the engine is interrupted or when there is faulty combustion, resulting in an engine failure.
Twin-engined aircraft, however, are usually able to keep flying even when one engine has failed.
The plane was powered by two Pratt & Whitney PW127M engines. Pratt & Whitney is part of United Technologies.
The head of Taiwan’s civil aviation authority, Lin Tyh-ming, said the aircraft last underwent maintenance on January 26. The pilot had 4,916 flying hours under his belt and the co-pilot had 6,922 hours, he said.
Songshan Airport, the smaller of two in Taipei, provides mostly domestic flights but also connections to Japan, South Korea and China’s mainland.
A statement from the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office said 31 of those on board were tourists from the southeastern city of Xiamen, which lies close to Taiwan’s Kinmen Island.
Three of the 31 tourists were children, Xinhua news agency said.
The crash is the latest in a string of mishaps to hit Asian carriers in the past 12 months. An AirAsia jet bound for Singapore crashed soon after taking off from the Indonesian city of Surabaya on December 28, killing all 162 people on board.
The disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jet last March, and the downing of a sister plane over Ukraine four months later with a combined loss of 537 lives, have dominated a United Nations safety conference this week.
TransAsia is Taiwan’s third-largest carrier. One of its ATR 72-500 planes crashed while trying to land at Penghu Island last July, killing 48 of the 58 passengers and crew on board.
Taiwan has had a poor aviation safety record in recent years, including the disintegration of a China Airlines 747 on a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong in 2002, killing 225.
The almost brand-new plane involved in yesterday’s incident was among the first of the ATR 72-600s, the latest variant of the turboprop aircraft, that TransAsia received last year as part of an order of eight aircraft two years earlier.
The 72-seat aircraft are mainly used to connect the island’s capital city Taipei with smaller cities and islands.
ATR is a joint venture between Airbus and Alenia Aermacchi, a subsidiary of Italy’s Finmeccanica.
France, where the aircraft was designed and built, said it was sending investigators to help with Taiwan’s accident probe.
TransAsia was founded in 1951 and was Taiwan’s first private commercial airline, initially flying domestic routes.
The latest disaster is bad news for the up-and-coming carrier as it seeks to compete with its bigger domestic rivals, China Airlines and Eva Air.
To keep up with competition from a growing crop of budget carriers in the region, it started its own discount airline, V Air, in December.
TransAsia operates about 20 planes from its base at Taipei’s Songshan Airport and has been planning to double that over the next five years.
Chairman Vincent Lin, who took over the job in 2010 and whose father heads the airline’s major shareholder Goldsun, has been adding new routes at a furious pace.
Since the carrier went public in 2011, it has added about two dozen routes to China’s mainland and other Asia cities, but some were later dropped.
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